Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

We tire differently if we love or love not.

The trouble is, as you get older, the people you like die and are not replaced with others, so that it is easily possible to end up with no one at all to talk to, or at least, no one you would want to hear responding to whatever it is you might have ended up saying.

Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn't what is or what was.

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.

That's the trouble with the hospital-they find all the things that have been killing you forever, and that you are okay with, you're okay with those things slowly killing you, but then they find them and get rid of them, and then other things replace the things you were fine with, and you are not fine, not fine at all with the new things, and so you die, slowly, in utter misery, just the way you would have before, only before you were pretty okay with the manner of it, but now you're not.

I was thinking about Lucia Stanton—this person who would basically disappear. What would I call myself next? What clothes would I wear? There is that part in the Bardo Thodol where the dead person goes into a womb to be born again into a new place, where the dead person actually chooses where she will be born—whether into an animal or a human, and into which land.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

reason and sensical behavior are not always necessary if there exists some small flood of kindness.

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...