Experience

I discover myself on the verge of a
usual mistake.

Time is not the great teacher.
Experience is. A man may live a
whole life, but if he never leaves
his home to experience that life,
he dies knowing nothing. A mere
child who has suffered and lived
can be the wiser of the two.

First of all nothing will happenand
a little laternothing will happen
again.

Given the choice between the
experience of pain and nothing, I
would choose pain.

It is an illusion that youth is
happy, an illusion of those who
have lost it; but the young know
they are wretched for they are full
of the truthless ideal which have
been instilled into them, and each
time they come in contact with the
real, they are bruised and wounded.
It looks as if they were victims of
a conspiracy; for the books they
read, ideal by the necessity of
selection, and the conversation of
their elders, who look back upon
the past through a rosy haze of
forgetfulness, prepare them for an
unreal life. They must discover for
themselves that all they have read
and all they have been told are
lies, lies, lies; and each
discovery is another nail driven
into the body on the cross of life.

No matter how careful you are,
there's going to be the sense you
missed something, the collapsed
feeling under your skin that you
didn't experience it all. There's
that fallen heart feeling that you
rushed right through the moments
where you should've been paying
attention. Well, get used to that
feeling. That's how your whole life
will feel some day. This is all
practice.

Things change. And friends leave.
Life doesn't stop for anybody.

A learning experience is one of
those things that says, 'You know
that thing you just did? Don't do
that.'

Experience is what you got by not
having it when you need it.

Unkwon

Good judgment comes from
experience, and often experience
comes from bad judgment.

Rita Mae Brown