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Jesse Ball QUOTES

Jesse Ball QUOTES

1 " 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 , The Curfew

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

― Jesse Ball , The Curfew

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

― Jesse Ball , The Curfew

4 " …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 , The Curfew

5 " We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise. "

― Jesse Ball , A Cure for Suicide

6 " You aren’t the thing that needs to change. It’s that you are overcome by your situation, by the way the world has descended on you. There is much in you that is young and new – and not just in you. In any person, even the oldest conceivable person. That’s what it means to be living – to engage with the cacophony of objects. "

― Jesse Ball , A Cure for Suicide

7 " 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 , A Cure for Suicide

8 " – Some people forget, do you know – they forget what it is like to be young, to feel things ruthlessly, terribly. If you forget that much of life, well, I don’t know. "

― Jesse Ball , A Cure for Suicide

9 " As I sat in the office of the cure, he began to speak and explain to me what it was. I was there, and I had no choice but to continue, it seemed there was nothing but that, nothing else – and yet, it was being explained to me, almost without my permission, as a matter of course, this thing I did not understand: the cure for suicide. "

― Jesse Ball , A Cure for Suicide

10 " 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 , The Curfew

11 " 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 , The Curfew

12 " Of silence, I can say only what I 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 , Silence Once Begun

13 " No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution. "

― Jesse Ball

14 " 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 , How to Set a Fire and Why

15 " 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 , How to Set a Fire and Why

16 " There is a constitution that some have, and I had it---to which everything foreign is wondrous, and all that is domestic, tiresome. "

― Jesse Ball , Census

17 " 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 , The Way Through Doors

18 " ..it was important to figure out what things were worth doing---and then to just do those things, don’t do any of the other ones. People will try to convince you, always they will try to convince you to do things you should on no account do. Negotiating these terrible pathways full of bad advice---it is the principal danger of youth. That and suicide. "

― Jesse Ball , Census

19 " ...a name is almost always a sort of cowardice---an attempt to confine a thing to being only what it is, rather than what it may be. "

― Jesse Ball , Census

20 " En sevdiği oyuncağıydı. Neydi? Kırmızıya boyanmış, ufak, tahta bir kuş. Kırmızıydı, gerçekten öyleydi; tam da gün ışığında, gölgede, mumlarla, şöminenin başında ona bakan bir oğlan çocuğunu hayallere daldıracak, parlak, tatlı bir kırmızı. Ama muhabbetkuşu ya da öyle değersiz bir tür olduğunu sanmayın. Hayır, onun kuşu bir baykuştu. "

― Jesse Ball , Samedi the Deafness