Quotes from Jesse Ball

But dreams are imagined. They are a work of the imagination.

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.

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.

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

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.

The main thing was for him to feel that we were all together taking part in a joined project—the project of our life. To be a part of such a thing, he wanted nothing more than that. Indeed, it is what most of us want, isn't it? Why should he be any different?

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

One is expecting something , and can't say what — yet when one sees it , one knows what one knew , what one knew and couldn't say . It is this way with death . It is in our nature to feel the extent of it when we face it , and to have it fall away the moment we turn

For where he had been the largeness of her life, now his loss was; his loss was, and the worth of what he had been: those two things together became the core

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

These things have happened so often that it becomes clear: a man like this did not die because of what he did but because of what he was. We are the ones who have the privilege of having things happen to us because of what we do. Not everyone is so lucky.

For the first time in a long while, he looked down and saw his hands. If you have had this experience, you'll know just what I mean.

At all times all parts of the world are eternally fascinating.

We felt lucky to have had him, and lucky to become the ones who were continually with him, caring for him. I have read some books of philosophy in which the freedom of burdens is explained, that somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it, we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live.

When there is nothing to do you do what little there is. What little is left.

In any case, this is how we ended up making our friends--by pushing away the people we thought brutal, and gathering to ourselves those we thought kind and subtle.

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

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

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.

When the person you love has died, any indication that they once lived is received gratefully, or alternatively, you want to pretend that nothing good has ever taken place in the world.

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.

Muscles are the way the body obeys the mind.

read widely because almost nothing has been everywhere applied.

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.