Individual Experiences Quotes

We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.

It's pretty rare to just talk to people who are having a tough time in the economy, to hear their individual stories.

We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

We're all born, and if you're going to live to be elderly, you'll have gone through a life journey different than anyone else's. It's unique to you, but you'll have some common themes.

When you're dying, you're liberated to do what you want to do. You give yourself permission. I think everyone's experience with a terminal disease is so deeply personal and unique to the person, the context in which they're living and the relationships that they have.

We all have to acknowledge the life and the path we were born into. And the things that define us, they're often somewhat narrow: our class, our race, our gender, where we grew up, what geography we were exposed to. The curiosity and wonderment of, "What it's like on your path?" - that's when you go into high alert.

It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.

Everybody has a story. And there's something to be learned from every experience.

I think the whole of people's psychology and where they are in life interests me, and the decisions you make that take you on particular journeys to different places.

Isn't everyone just travelling down their own road watching the signs as they go?

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.

Live your life, experience something, and then you're going to have a lot of things to say. But if you hang around in Hollywood, then you're going to say the same thing as everyone else - nothing.

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses.

Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediums—and if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.

I'd be devastated if my son grows up to be a hetero. I mean, I'd still love him ... but as a parent you just envision a certain life for your child. I mean, if he's straight, think of all the fabulous things he's going to miss out on. When I think my son might never know the joys of having a quarter share on Fire Island and walking through Judy Garland Memorial Park on the way to the Meat Rack.

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside - some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me - we aren't so special, bro.

Adults need more complex narratives. They have their own narratives. The main characters are themselves.

On ne re c° oit pas la sagesse, il faut la de couvrir soi-me" me, apre' s un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous e pargner. We do not receive wisdom.We must discover it ourselves after experiences which no one else can have for us and from which no one else can spare us.

Don't let your luggage define your travels, each life unravels differently.

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own.