Quotes from Jesse Ball

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

However, out in the world I have come to see that he who looks too hard for any particular thing, though he may find it, will certainly miss the most wondrous and strange things he passes, though they stare him in the face.

That's just how it is with history. You do things and later on when people see what you did, it looks bad.

My aunt says that I am naturally curious. That means that I don't need to be taught how to learn. Some people have a disadvantage at the beginning, and they are not curious. These people have trouble learning. It seems like not being curious is the worst thing of all. Curious people aren't necessarily good at learning what you want them to learn, though. They are too busy learning about other things.

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

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.

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.

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

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, and then to see what it is. I believe in trying to understand love through other loves, other loves that have existed before. Many people have made the records of these loves. These records can be found. They can be read. Some are songs. Some are just photographs. Most are stories.

In general I think sadness kind of take the strength away from anger, or maybe they just waver back and forth. I don't know. All I know is most of the time I am one or the other—angry or sad.

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.

Why had he done it? It had been an idea of the morning—morning ideas were always flawed. They never take into account the accretion of weariness and grief that the late day brings.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles 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.

What kind of suicide is it to kill in the world what you find in yourself?

Do the places we inhabit confine us by their very nature? Are we always imprisoned, eternally imprisoned, in body, in place, in community, do even our minds imprison us? What would it be like to be free, even for a second? Is that death? Do we live only in that final moment when we flee our shape?

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.

There is a feeling that we are things in common not alone. That I am myself in terms of you, and you you in terms of others. Together we make a world and go on in this sea of days and months. In this picture no one is their own--everyone is everyone else; our bodies are the possession of our society. We might own things but never ourselves. Yet I think there is a different duty.

I was wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. Everyday life is the province of death. It is where all dying takes place--for the extraordinary lands we imagine simply do not exist. There is only the ordinary. It is what we inhabit, and when death comes to find us it is there that he looks.