Quotes About Experience

The course of life is unpredictable... no one can write his autobiography in advance.

I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that "it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams."

And in the end it is not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'

If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic." p 108

it was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school.

After just a week in the hospital, I felt I'd left America for another country. My world was a land of fluorescent lights where day and night were the same, and where more than half the citizens spoke Spanish. When they spoke English it wasn't what I expected in the land of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn't trickled down to this zip code. Three

A chasm separates that memory from this moment.

Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.

Child, the past is past, and furthermore it's different every time I remember it.

He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward." from CUTTING FOR STONE

Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.

Why was it one had to leave something, or have it taken away, to really appreciate it? But tonight, she's the storyteller, because he's hungry to hear every detail of her medical world, bringing his curiosity like a moth to anything that shines of new knowledge.

What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.

it is a reminder that the sweetness of life comes with bitterness.

People's minds are changed through observation and not through argument. —WILL ROGERS

What if, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

It turns out poetry does, in fact, do the thing I want it to do… it helps me return to the world, to experience it, to pay attention.