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"Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality."
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"Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response."
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Personal Development
"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."
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Personal Development
"Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience."
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Personal Development
"Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?"
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Personal Development
"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."
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Personal Development
"Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation."
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Personal Development
"Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work."
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Personal Development
"Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience."
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Personal Development
"For me, the desire exists less to get myself a degree than to just go and have the whole college experience, and throw myself into the brain pool and see if I can swim."
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Personal Development
"God is only a great imaginative experience."
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Personal Development
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"That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself."
Emotion
"I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too."
Reading
"Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini."
Parenting
"Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues."
Introspection
"That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away."
Emotion
"There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything."
Evolution
"The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."
Sentimentality
"I don't have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes-and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don't think jokes even belong in proper books. I won't bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature."
Education
"I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature."
Authenticity
"It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself."
Christmas
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