Human Experience Quotes

“Autumn colors remind us we are all one dancing in the wind.”
― Lorin Morgan-Richards

“...and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience.”
― Dean Koontz, Saint Odd

“An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

“People didn't call blacks names anymore, at least not to their faces. Italians weren't wops or dagos, and there were no more kikes, Japs, chinks, or spics in polite conversation. Everybody had a group to protest and stick up for them. But women were still being called names by men. Why? Where was our group? It's not fair.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and I'm sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“After the boy at the supermarket had called her those names, Evelyn Couch had felt violated. Raped by words. Stripped of everything. She had always tried to keep this from happening to her, always been terrified of displeasing men, terrified of the names she would be called if she did. She had spent her life tiptoeing around them like something lifting her skirt stepping through a cow pasture. She had always suspected that if provoked, those names were always close to the surface, ready to lash out and destroy her.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Michael: You won't really know what's going to happen to you. That's what makes it special. I won't exactly know what's going to happen after I die. Nothing more human than that.”
― The Good Place

“....life is the work of the spirit trying to have a human experience.”
― Holly Lynn Payne

“Masturbation is insanely amazing but the gift of giving orgasms and receiving orgasms from another human is invaluable.”
― Helen Edwards, Nothing Sexier Than Freedom

“We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Innumerable arcs intersect and scatter into a vast indefinite sea.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Inspiration comes from living it.”
― Lorin Morgan-Richards

“Stories themselves have spirit and being, and they have a way of communicating on different levels. The story itself communicates with us regardless of what language it is told in. Of course stories are always funnier and more vivid when they are told in their original language by a good storyteller. But what I love about stories is they can survive and continue in some form or other resembling themselves regardless of how good or how bad the storyteller is, no matter what language they are told or written in. This is because the human brain favors stories or the narrative form as a primary means of organizing and relating human experience. Stories contain large amounts of valuable information even when they storyteller forgets or invents details.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

“Novels are about exploring unexplored territory in the human experience or, at least, drawing new maps of old lands.”
― Carsten Jensen

“I love going to places where I can sit and people watch, take in the colors of their clothes, the wrinkles they have around their eyes when they smile, their body language when meeting one another, and sometimes I even eavesdrop on their conversations - wink!”
― Helen Edwards, Nothing Sexier Than Freedom

“Doubt and faith are parts of human experience, whether one views them as right or wrong. Also doubt and faith are instrumental to grasping truth in some very obvious senses.”
― Leviak B. Kelly, The Leprechaun Delusion

“Pushing our pain aside...diminishes our human experience.”
― Cindee Snider Re, Discovering Hope: Beginning the Journey Toward Hope in Chronic Illness

“All of us are part of a beautiful pageantry of human experience. Let us make the most of this life in all we do.”
― Laurence Overmire, A Revolutionary American Family: The McDonalds of Somerset County, New Jersey

“Adversity is part of the human experience; without it, we would have no reason for self-improvement.”
― Asa Don Brown

“Right now, I believe I'm a free source of energy whipped into a spiritual being having a human experience. The key word here is: Experience; not Experienced.”
― Helen Edwards, Nothing Sexier Than Freedom

“So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Emma, you and your poetry, me and my acting--what are we trying to do? We can't top this city. We poor would-be artists can't compete with or improve on the rich density of human experience on any random, average, slow summer night in New York--who are we trying to kid? In the overheard conversation in the elevator, in the five minutes of talk the panhandler gives you before hitting you for the handout, in the brief give-and-take when you are going out and the cleaning lady is coming in--there are the real stories, incredible, heartbreaking and ridiculous, there are the command performances, the Great American Novels but forever unwritten, untoppable, and so beautifully unaware.”
― Wilton Barnhardt, Emma Who Saved My Life

“We can see from our human experience that battling temptation requires that we persevere in keeping faith in the Father from our own will however faltering it may be. It is only an appearance that the Lord leaves us alone; in truth He is closest to us during our greatest trials and lowest times.”
― Steve Sanchez, Rethinking Redemption

“Even as a creative artist, I used to think enduring struggles and hard days in silence and telling people everything was great meant I was strong. And then I learned it just meant I was scared---scared of people not loving me any other way. Scared of sharing the lessons that pain had to teach. I no longer see perpetual claims of "fineness" as strength.

People desperately need to see the full human experience, especially the dark parts. They need to know that other folks struggle, too, and that it's all part of a bigger story of triumph. They need permission to keep going, knowing that hardship is normal for everyone. Give them that gift. Have that courage. Tell the whole story.”
― Jennifer DeLucy

“To go peacefully in my sleep: that's the understandable wish of many, and I don't dispute the peaceful part. But to die and not be aware of it, not digest what's happening to you, not experience it, not glimpse the narrowed glare of the Reaper? That seems to me a stupendous deprivation and injustice. Next to being born, dying is the most important thing that ever happens to you.”
― William Giraldi, The Hero's Body: A Memoir

“The Universe wants to move you onto another road in life - onto another journey and you dare defy the signs? Signs only get bigger and louder.”
― Helen Edwards, Nothing Sexier Than Freedom

“My mind is blown every time I think of how my body is designed. I'm built with such divine mechanics to think, feel, look, and breathe. It's insane!”
― Helen Edwards, Nothing Sexier Than Freedom

“A cadaver does not yield the secret to the human experience.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“Writing is purity. It is the human condition to share thoughts, feelings, experiences.”
― PHILLIP Harrison

“All people usually want or need is just to be loved and excepted, while we are learning and growing, not to be judged or put down for being human or when we make mistakes.”
― Kae Lemuel, From Hell's Flames to His Loving Arms