Quotes from Jesse Ball

Sometimes when people get to be too nice, you end up not thanking them, because you are completely tired of saying thank you. Then they become more and more hangdog and you want to thank them even less.

She said she hadn't thought of that. Not finishing the test might be part of the test.

We get offered so few real victories. It's a question I can't even really answer: what is the victory I want?

But, if life is just that, just being reasonable, then there is nothing in it--nothing worthwhile. So, the yearning that we have to keep dead things living--or to make unreasonable things reasonable. That is why a person should live.

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.

This, she said, is a book. It is one of our ways of codifying and keeping human knowledge. When it cannot be kept in a person's head, this is one method of keeping it safe. It is a good way of moving ideas from one head to another, as it only requires one person's time to do it, and not two.

Your life has been made up of chambers, a series of chambers, so the interlocutor said, his hand on my arm — and in each chamber it is difficult to remember exactly what it was like to be in the previous room. You can remember that certain things happened when you were a child. But, what it was like to be there, to be a child, it really is lost to you. Our world is a difficult succession of losses, vaguely remembered, vaguely enshrined.

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.

You prattle on when you should listen. You ask the questions as if the meaning of the question is obvious, rather than asking it in such a way that the person is removed past himself/herself to the place in which the answer resides. Are questions so obvious? I think not. Do not let yourself make them so.

One wants the struggle. One shouldn't permit it to be removed.

I smell the wet black dirt and remember days in the garden, when it would have been possible to stand and run to my wife or stand and run to my son. But I did not do so. I concerned myself with parsley or yams or pulling weeds. I had so much and all at once. There is too much light in those thoughts. Light everywhere. It obliterates me. I recoil.

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.

The university grounds are really beautiful. Universities always try that bullshit. They want you to think wonderful things are going on inside of them because the grounds are beautiful. In general, it is good to be suspicious of monetary displays. Large swaths of bright green well-watered grass—a thing like that is a huge lie.

So—a French garden, as far as I can tell, is a garden that gets tended. You know, my aunt, she walks around it slowly and bends down now and then to pull up some shit, or to stick some other stuff in somewhere. That's a French garden. An English garden is something that used to be a French garden but that no one does anything to anymore. So, it looks run-down. Things don't grow in proper lines. This is what they tell me. My

Ignorance is not about the amount of knowledge. It is about the mechanism of choosing actions. If one chooses actions based upon that which is known to be true - and tries hard to make that domain grow, the domain of knowledge, then he will be rational. Meanwhile, someone else who has much more knowledge might make decisions without paying any attention to truth. That person is ignorant.

En sevdi?i oyunca??yd?. Neydi? K?rm?z?ya boyanm??, ufak, tahta bir ku?. K?rm?z?yd?, gerçekten öyleydi; tam da gün ?????nda, gölgede, mumlarla, ?öminenin ba??nda ona bakan bir o?lan çocu?unu hayallere dald?racak, parlak, tatl? bir k?rm?z?. Ama muhabbetku?u ya da öyle de?ersiz bir tür oldu?unu sanmay?n. Hay?r, onun ku?u bir bayku?tu.

It is so easy for humans to be cruel, and they leap to it. They love to do it. It is an exercise of all their laughable powers

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.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

To a liar, the most dangerous individual is the person who catches lies but doesn't say anything about it. Then the liar isn't sure which lies are compromised.

Different times and different structures make more sense at one point in life than at another.

I just think we're on this rock orbiting a sun that's going to go out, and I don't know that human society is necessarily a wonderful thing for the planet. I think people can be kind to one another and share things, but I don't know that this particular iteration of civilization is to be preferred to any other.

The move to hide aging is sort of sad. But it's a wonderful thing to celebrate our aging.

When I was a child, my father would read out loud to my brother, my mother, and me. Several times in the course of my childhood, he would read 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' over a few weeks. They were a great favorite with all of us.