Quotes About Experience

the book is intended to show how it is possible to live in and be enlarged by loss, even as we continue to experience it.

Booze has a different effect when you're, like, ten. Its doesn't round out the edges so much as wash you right out of the picture.

It feels like I went right from pubescent to senior citizen. But what are you going to do? I'm lucky I caught myself. I might have ended up the only man in the rest home who still thought Jack Kerouac was cool.

The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement.

They have all distinguished between two forms of knowledge, one abstract and formulaic, the other more practical and tacit. Practical or tacit knowledge is the product of experience: it can be learned, but cannot be conveyed in general formulas. Abstract knowledge, by contrast, is a matter of technique, which, it is assumed, can be easily systematized, conveyed, and applied.

And, as recounted in the book Moneyball, statistical analysis can sometimes discover that clearly measureable but neglected characteristics are more significant than is recognized by intuitive understanding based on accumulated experience.

Un sentimiento de absurdo, tétrico y grotesco: he aquí la única verdad estúpida que había quedado después de todas sus experiencias. La vida entera parecía no tener más significado que un puñado de arena. Bastaba con abrir los dedos para que no quedara nada.

There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening.

There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.

It's possible, when you've been married for twenty-five or thirty years, when your children have grown up and moved away, to keep coming back across the tail ends of conversations you started in a different decade, and to realize that whole areas of existence have lain dormant all that time, like seeds in an envelope. There's nothing unusual about that.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.

And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking--how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe--Pasquale Tursi said, only, "Yes.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

People who keep journals have life twice.

In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing. Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition. Did they glow with light? They did, but of course, it could not be seen. And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows.

Some people forget, do you know – they forget what it is like to be young, to feel things ruthlessly, terribly. If you forget that much of life, well, I don't know.

She explained crying to him. He said that it felt very good. In his opinion, it was almost the same as laughing. She said that many people believe it is the same.

Your life has been made up of chambers, a series of chambers, so the interlocutor said, his hand on my arm — and in each chamber it is difficult to remember exactly what it was like to be in the previous room. You can remember that certain things happened when you were a child. But, what it was like to be there, to be a child, it really is lost to you. Our world is a difficult succession of losses, vaguely remembered, vaguely enshrined.