Annette Bening Quotes

The thing about wisdom is you store the past in your head.

Now you see how you are, the wisdom mixed in with all the scars.

Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

September 11 reinforced for me that whatever I'm writing about, it better be something that really matters to me because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And for me it's stories about people in pain in New York.

Before, I was so stupid. But, you know, when you have friends who died on the street, you say, okay, let's calm down. It's not the kind of energy I want to have in life. I want to go slower, and longer.

I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.

At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life.

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.

I became an adult in an extreme way. I was recently sorting some old photographs and I found another.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

I think everyone understands grief, the journey it takes us on, whether it's the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a disappointment. Some people don't deal with it, the power of it. Some do. Some feel the weight of it and it informs their choices. I've had to open up to grief in different contexts.

If you learn the language of loss early, I think you seek out others who have experienced the same thing, who speak that same language of loss.

When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.

It takes an extraordinary toll on me to re-live my experiences, the horrors of my past and the pain I had to endure. And yet, I believe remembering is the only way to promote healing, to promote awareness and accountability.

We all have sadness in our life and things that we can draw upon.

Eulogy is nice, but one does not learn anything from it.

Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

The older you get the more you understand what you're doing.

Love has more depth as you get older.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

I'm beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.

Experience is what you have after you've forgotten her name.

I'd say that after my father passed my writing changed, it went deeper. Most would say 'matured' but I don't think I'd use that word in relation to my progress. I think 'change' is a little more accurate.