#ex

Mercer,” Polly says, “we are now going to hug. As a group. The experience will be very un-English. It will be good for you. Do not speak, at all, especially not in an attempt to diffuse the emotional intensity of the situation.” They hug, somewhat awkwardly, but with great feeling. “Well,” Mercer says, after a moment, “that was certainly—” “I will hit you with a shovel,” Polly Cradle murmurs. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#experience

I didn't move. I've learned from years of experience that dogs and falcons and ladies come back to you if you stay where you are. ↗

— Tracy Chevalier

#experience

My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. ↗

— H.G. Wells

#heaven #hope #inspiration #stars #experience

The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable. ↗

— Talal Asad

#eurabia #europe #european #islam #modernity-tags-civilization

I had met a young lady who wanted to be in the theater. It was Judy Holliday. She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today. ↗

— Adolph Green

#exists #fallen #had #i #judy

Let me tell you something you haven’t learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events—they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn’t have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don’t even notice at first, and then one day it’s there. You wake up and you just don’t have the fire anymore.” He smiled... ↗

— Terry Brooks

#experience

There's something really the matter with most people who wear tattoos. There's at least some terrible story. I know from experience that there's always something terribly flawed about people who are tattooed, above some little something that Johnny had done in the Navy, even though that's a bad sign...It's terrible. Psychologically it's crazy. Most people who are tattooed, it's the sign of some feeling of inferiority, they're trying to establish some macho identification for themselves. ↗

— Truman Capote

#tattooing #tattoos #experience

STRAUSS:Have you ever thought about putting those experiences into a book? RICHIE:I did decide to write about what i experienced in climbing to the top. And finally when I got there, I discovered what was at the top.You know what was there? STRAUSS: No, I don't. RICHIE: Nothing. Not one thing. What was at the top was all the experiences that you had to get there. ↗

— Neil Strauss

#climbing #experiences #finally #life #top

She really mellowed me out that way. We both definitely grew with each other and with the whole experience. ↗

— Brian Austin Green

#definitely #each #experience #grew #me

We read to lend words to our expe­ri­ence. As we read, we trans­late, as it were, the author’s words into our own expe­ri­ence, enlarg­ing the mean­ing of those words, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion. Not find­ing just any mean­ing, of course, if we read hon­estly, but mean­ings that many times escaped even the author, who is often the least shrewd of the read­ers of that text. We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#experience