Jesse Ball Quotes & Sayings

It was as though the edges of things were where the greater part might be hidden - where he could find more. — Jesse Ball

The students appeared to be ten or eleven. They were playing some trust game where the students would fall from things and be caught, or get wrapped up in a bag and dragged around and then released.
-I have never understood these games, said Loring. I don't know why you would want to make children more trusting. That is their principle fault to begin with. — Jesse Ball

But dreams are imagined. They are a work of the imagination. — Jesse Ball

No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution. — Jesse Ball

... In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it. — Jesse Ball

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is. — Jesse Ball

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you? — Jesse Ball

Maybe you can see from this that I am quite familiar with being in detention. Matter of fact, I feel like I have always been in detention. I am an old veteran of detention, like one of Napoleon's soldiers limping back from the battle of Moscow. No, not like them
they were chumps. More like
one of the girls who died in the Triangle Fire looking out the window and realizing it is too far to jump, then jumping. — Jesse Ball

I mean that the book had better make life better better in at least six or seven definite ways immediately. Also, there had better be somewhere in it a method for handling fortune and chance so as to best provoke the most complicated, involved, and glorious refractions of what's possible. — Jesse Ball

That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse! — Jesse Ball

I hate when I break my own rules. What's the point of me being rational if I flail around like a clown? — Jesse Ball

- This, she said, is a book. It is one of our ways of codifying and keeping human knowledge. When it cannot be kept in a person's head, this is one method of keeping it safe. It is a good way of moving ideas from one head to another, as it only requires one person's time to do it, and not two. — Jesse Ball

I will tell you it simply: he felt he was falling. He felt he fell through a succession of wells, of holes, of chasms, and that I was there at windows, and we would be together for a moment as he fell by. Then I would rush to the next window , down and down, and he would fall past, and I would see him again. — Jesse Ball

Are we not all the same? Do we not all strive to simply have enough? — Jesse Ball

A statue in the center of a town: sometimes is a god, and other times, it is something upon which to hang laundry. — Jesse Ball

Mr. Gibbons had the talent that many puppeteers have of speaking to children as though he believed they were intelligent and could understand a thing or two. — Jesse Ball

It never occurred to him to wonder how there could be so many people, so many shifting groups that he only saw once in so small a village. Not matter how many such scenes played out, he didn't wonder
for Henry had become a very particular sort of person. He had been groomed to be a person who did not ask questions. He had not been told to be that way, but all the same he had been led to it, and now that he was there, he felt a great comfort. — Jesse Ball

Much of the speech we do is largely meaningless and is just meant to communicate and validate small emotional contracts. — Jesse Ball

The action of a thing is the same as the naming of it - is, in fact, the real name. The trees creak and they are saying, 'trees creak through the long night.' The long night - what is it? Trees creaking. There wasn't anything that tied life's moments together, except life. And when it was gone? — Jesse Ball

You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer. — Jesse Ball

She said she hadn't thought of that. Not finishing the test might be part of the test. — Jesse Ball

If you want to say, Lucia, there is no inside of the park benches, I won't argue with you. But, then you have to say where the pigeons come from. — Jesse Ball

Muscles are the way the body obeys the mind. — Jesse Ball

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have. — Jesse Ball

It is an enduring satisfaction for our species to make little systems and tend to them. — Jesse Ball

We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise. — Jesse Ball

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all. — Jesse Ball

Sadness is a feeling of loss. There is something one wanted, and one doesn't have it - or there is a way one wanted things to be, and things aren't that way. That is sadness. Instead, you feel rootlessness. — Jesse Ball

And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air. — Jesse Ball

Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture! — Jesse Ball

She would allow her hair to be loose, and she then would appear to me out of the corner of my eye as some blinding Valkyrie, some effulgent flood of a thing, beauty without no boundaries, burning at the edges of itself. — Jesse Ball

... There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. "
"What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability? — Jesse Ball

The world isn't the place we are told to live in. It is another place entirely. We have both more choice, and less, than we are supposed to have. — Jesse Ball

One cultivates one's life, one's friends, one's means, one's hopes. One goes from place to place, from triumph to triumph, in search of ambition and ambition's remedy as though in flight across some imagined map, the subject of a conversation in a comfortable English room. — Jesse Ball

The third part of my life was where I was told the meaning of my life. One knows the weight of a thing when it is strong enough to bear its own meaning, to hear its own truth told to it, and yet to remain. — Jesse Ball

The old man sang for a while, and Mora felt in her head the beginning of a long siege. A wilderness had crept up around a walled town, and the darkness of old woods and far-off places began to grow then, even within sight of where men walked together.
By this she meant in her heart that all the useless things one remembers well just before waking and forgets just after were in fact very important and perhaps all that stood now between herself and oblivion. — Jesse Ball

She explained crying to him. He said that it felt very good. In his opinion, it was almost the same as laughing. She said that many people believe it is the same. — Jesse Ball

The old man began to sing. His voice was very lovely and obviously a part of something that the world had disposed of in its haste, evidence of a grander, kinder past. — Jesse Ball

Sometimes when people get to be too nice, you end up not thanking them, because you are completely tired of saying thank you. Then they become more and more hangdog and you want to thank them even less. — Jesse Ball

There will be no magic, whatsoever. Magic is either a poverty-stricken necessity or a wealthy fantasy. We are in neither of those straits, and what cannot be explained will be left unknown. — Jesse Ball

CIVILIAN OR MILITARY The governments of the world would like very much for you to make the distinction between civilian and military targets. This is interesting because they do not make that distinction when they wage their class warfare upon us. Is a family a military target when they are beaten and thrown in the street and their belongings are tossed in the gutter? There are no military targets. Likewise, there are no civilian targets. These are abstract ideas that are part of a nineteenth-century framework. We — Jesse Ball

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life. — Jesse Ball

Yes, they put their babies inside an iron stove full of coals. So, if you see a Russian person doing something crazy, as you sometimes do, remember - they have been doing that shit forever. It's nothing new. — Jesse Ball

Three things are required of you: the wishes you made when you first knew the breadth of this life; the contract you signed when you decided your wishes were not true or possible; and the exacting of the punishment you agreed to when you knew you would break the contract of your life. — Jesse Ball

Of silence, I can say only what I have heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave
and so speech isn't itself, but its effect, and silence is the same. — Jesse Ball

Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory. — Jesse Ball

It is for this girl that the young man is looking. Day after day he wakes in morning and goes searching for her. In his work, and in his life on mornings that are not miraculous and afternoons that are sundry and various, he saves the corners of his eyes for her, and watches at all times the entrances and exits of every establishment to which he comes. For he knows that eventually, in time and given some protracted period of days, weeks, and months, he will come up on her, and know her in an instant for who she is. — Jesse Ball

We tire differently if we love or love not. — Jesse Ball

I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though violence may connect them, though pity, compassion, hope may marry one thing to another, still all that is in process cannot be judged, and that which has passed has gone beyond judgment, which leaves us again, with lives and belongings, places, shuttling here and there, hapless, benighted, discordant. — Jesse Ball

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another. — Jesse Ball

The effect of untrue statements on casual conversations is one of my great loves, my great ongoing investigations. — Jesse Ball

-A hermit always longs for visitors, said Loring,until they come, and then he wishes them gone. — Jesse Ball

The old man took out an extraordinarily beautiful and elegant handkerchief and gave it to her to dry her tears. It was the sort of handkerchief that one might be content to be judged by if it was all that remained of one after one's death. — Jesse Ball

-Lara is a weasel. I've always hated her. The only happy week I had as a child was when she fell from the roof and went into a coma. She came out of it, though. Everyone was so happy.
-Is that true? asked James.
-No, said Grieve. But they would have been happy. Everyone thinks she's so clever. And I would be happy if she went away and never came back. — Jesse Ball

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the trouble of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another. — Jesse Ball

Never fall into the mistake of believing, said the examiner, that things are everywhere the way they are here, wherever here is, wherever everywhere is. — Jesse Ball

I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor. — Jesse Ball

- But, if life is just that, just being reasonable, then there is nothing in it - nothing worthwhile. So, the yearning that we have to keep dead things living - or to make unreasonable things reasonable. That is why a person should live. — Jesse Ball

In the next room, perhaps twenty people were sitting around, drinking what looked like wine out of wine-glasses. They were the sort of people William and Louisa used to be in the habit of knowing, a crowd of elegant furniture, like the legs of a herd of gazelle taken together, and equally useless, when all things are considered. — Jesse Ball

First thing I do when I get in a library is - I go to the stacks and nose around. The idea is - you don't know what you're interested in. That's why it's possible to be surprised. So, instead of looking for things in particular, you look for what you didn't know you liked, and then when you find it you know that you liked it, and then you are a broader person than you were before. — Jesse Ball

This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives. — Jesse Ball

We get offered so few real victories. It's a question I can't even really answer: what is the victory I want? — Jesse Ball

We are born in this cemetery, but must not despair.
-Piet Soron, 1847 — Jesse Ball

The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable. — Jesse Ball

The university grounds are really beautiful. Universities always try that bullshit. They want you to think wonderful things are going on inside of them because the grounds are beautiful. In general, it is good to be suspicious of monetary displays. Large swaths of bright green well-watered grass
a thing like that is a huge lie. — Jesse Ball

Our knowledge about ourselves is our least reliable knowledge. Yet, so thoroughly do we ordinarily champion our own cause that it is acknowledged effective to believe that a person who deems it impossible to any further champion his/her own cause must be guilty. — Jesse Ball

If they make you put on a suit, it's because they are going to do something horrible to you. I guarantee it. — Jesse Ball

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography. — Jesse Ball

In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing. Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition. Did they glow with light? They did, but of course, it could not be seen. And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows. — Jesse Ball