Quotes about Experience

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth…

All good novelists have bad memories.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about . . .

What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.

Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution.

to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory...

But we do not love people for what they do for us. Love happens to us; it isn't created.

Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.