Quotes about Experience
That grief should come and bring joy with it was not something I felt able, or even called upon, to sort out or understand. I accepted the grief. I accepted the joy. I accepted that they came to me out of the same world.
- Wendell Berry
Now, surely, I am getting old, for my memory of myself as a young man seems now to be complete, as a story told. The young man leaps, and lands on an old man's legs.
- Wendell Berry
What a wonder I was when I was young, as I learn by the stern privilege of being old: how regardlessly I stepped the rough pathways of the hillside woods, treaded hardly thinking the tumbled stairways of the steep streams, and worked unaching hard days thoughtful only of the work, the passing light, the heat, the cool water I gladly drank.
- Wendell Berry
It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it.
- Wendell Berry
You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time." "And how long is that going to take?" "I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps." "That could be a long time." "I will tell you a further mystery," he said "It may take longer.
- Wendell Berry
Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.
- Wendell Berry
The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil...It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility...
- Wendell Berry
But all those who were there, if they had lived past childhood, had twice in this world, first and last, been as helpless as a little child.
- Wendell Berry
Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]
- William Faulkner
Memory believes before knowing remembers.
- William Faulkner
how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
- William Faulkner
It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.
- William Faulkner