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61 " When I think about what my future holds, it is a bit like looking into the sun. I flinch away, or I don’t and my eyes get burned down a bit, like candles, and then I can’t see for a while. "
― Jesse Ball , How to Set a Fire and Why
62 " The fact that he chose the images for the wall, and that he liked to look at them did not really imply that he thought the person in the photographs was himself. And, in fact, I think we as people make a kind of mistake in believing this to be true in general about photographs of ourselves. Is that really you in the photograph? Or is it someone you have a connection with? Someone you once knew, but who now is foreign to you? A person whose concerns you share in part - but who is lost and gone away? "
― Jesse Ball , Census
63 " it is not just a matter of feeling—how can this go right, what can I do to make this right, but there is also this other thing—that you think, life is truly absurd, and there really is no meaning, only objects of various size colliding in space, if they are so lucky as to be near each other. "
64 " 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 , Silence Once Begun
65 " Just in case the letter doesn’t get all the way to you, I gave it some wings so it could fly the rest of the way. "
66 " -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 , Samedi the Deafness
67 " My wife wrote me letters when we first met. We would meet every day, or nearly every day, but still she would write me letters. She thought the person she was in her letters was someone she herself did not know until the letter was written, and then it was like she was meeting herself. "
68 " -A hermit always longs for visitors, said Loring,until they come, and then he wishes them gone. "
― Jesse Ball , The Lesson
69 " 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. "
70 " Much of the deep depression that surrounds us in life has to do with this one thing — that we can’t even see the smallest plainest objects. "
71 " 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 , The Curfew
72 " 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. "
73 " I asked him if he had bothered to have children. He said yes, he had children. I said why if this is the result. He said I beg your pardon. I said if it leads to this, where you're a skin bag full of putrescent failing organs, and time passes quickly, it passes so quickly, and he knew that, then why have kids. "
74 " [...] reason and sensical behavior are not always necessary if there exists some small flood of kindness. "
75 " We deceive ourselves into thinking life is long, but fire reminds us-it is flickering. Life is a flickering-and then it is gone. So, we must make the most of it.Fire is red. It is yellow. It is blue. It is black as ash, brown as seared lines on timbers. Fire is the pink of flesh, and the gray of smoke that trails. Fire is the all-color that dwells before color, that which comes when one feels a fire will be set... "
76 " How can it be, we asked ourselves again and again, that they're all so cruel to him? How can this enormous conspiracy exist where everyone has agreed ahead of time that it is completely alright to be hurtful to these harmless people who hurt no one? The situation in some ways tinges everything with the sadness of these inevitable encounters. People's ignorance was so sharp then, it is still sharp now, and many of them cannot perform so much as a basic interaction without saying something base and awful or laughing or outright turning away. It is true though that there is another side which is it made it easier to find the people who are worthwhile as they were and are in no way troubled by him and entered into an immediate camaraderie. Such a person is difficult to guess at. I would not always have known them from their appearance. For people with innate gentleness and sensitivity are often compelled to hide or disguise it. "
77 " 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. "
78 " Are we not all the same? Do we not all strive to simply have enough? "
79 " 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 , A Cure for Suicide
80 " 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 , The Way Through Doors