Quotes about Experience

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out … the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning …

She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup. as if there was an eddy--there--and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real; the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the noise of the waves--all this was real.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

I make it a rule to try everything, she said. Don't you think it would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your deathbed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account alone.

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun - like two friends starting to meet each other across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself...

And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. Mr

she] might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.

How terrible old age was, she thought; shearing off all one's faculties, one by one, but leaving something alive in the centre.

She must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.

Knowledge comes through suffering.