Jesse Ball > Quotes

“First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.”
― Jesse Ball, The Way Through Doors

“…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. "

"What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“Three things are required of you: the wishes you made when you first knew the breadth of this life; the contract you signed when you decided your wishes were not true or possible; and the exacting of the punishment you agreed to when you knew you would break the contract of your life.”
― Jesse Ball

“Never fall into the mistake of believing, said the examiner, that things are everywhere the way they are here, wherever here is, wherever everywhere is.”
― Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide

“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.”
― Jesse Ball, Census

“We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise.”
― Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide

“--Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!”
― Jesse Ball, The Way Through Doors

“In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the trouble 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.”
― Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun

“Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.”
― Jesse Ball, Samedi the Deafness

“And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air.”
― Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun

“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.”
― Jesse Ball, Census

“We deceive ourselves into thinking life is long, but fire reminds us—it is a flickering. Life is a flickering—and then it is gone. So, we must make the most of it.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what it's like to hear something like that? To hear someone say something and feel the world ripple around you?”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“In order to effect another person you must perform some action. Then you must be patient enough to wait for its effect. As you learn the signs of these effects, it may come to pass you do not need to wait as long. But as my wife often said, it can happen that you say or do a thing and the effect is felt years later perhaps in the reiteration of the scene in a dream. Who can say? Our actions echo.”
― Jesse Ball, Census

“It is an enduring satisfaction for our species to make little systems and tend to them.”
― Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide

“You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.”
― Jesse Ball, Samedi the Deafness

“I have always despised people who join societies. In general, I feel that groups of any kind are for the weak. The need for consensus is the most disgusting and pathetic aspect of our human world. Is there none who can simply wander alone beneath a sort of cloth tent painted with dreams?”
― Jesse Ball, Census

“The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable.”
― Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun

“Maybe you can see from this that I am quite familiar with being in detention. Matter of fact, I feel like I have always been in detention. I am an old veteran of detention, like one of Napoleon's soldiers limping back from the battle of Moscow. No, not like them--they were chumps. More like--one of the girls who died in the Triangle Fire looking out the window and realizing it is too far to jump, then jumping.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“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, is it not? Why should he be any different?”
― Jesse Ball, Census

“In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing. Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition. Did they glow with light? They did, but of course, it could not be seen. And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“I want you to go out and buy yourself a lighter or a good box of matches. If they are matches, it is nice for them to be strike-anywhere matches. Those are the best kind. The lighter does not have to be a very nice one. In fact, it should be fairly nondescript, if possible. You will keep it in your pocket as a sort of token. Stick your hand in there now and then as you go around and remember: all the buildings that exist, all the grand structures of wealth and power, they remain standing because you permit them to remain. With this little lick of flame in your pocket, with this little gift of Prometheus, you can reduce everyone to a sort of grim equality. All those who ride on the high horse may be made to walk. Therefore, when you are at the bank and the bank manager speaks roughly to you, when you are denied entrance to a restaurant or other place of business, when you are made to work longer than you should need to, when you are driven out of your own little dwelling and made to live in the street, reach into your pocket, caress your own little vehicle of flame, and feel the comfort there. We shall set fires—and when we set them, we shall know why.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“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.”
― Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun

“No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution.”
― Jesse Ball

“We are born in this cemetery, but must not despair.

-Piet Soron, 1847”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“The whole thing about people living on in memory is a crock of shit. The best you can do is try to remember what you can, and include the memories in your routines. But, sometimes that makes the real memories fade faster.

We're just running down a fucking slope carrying these little flags, and one by one we get shot and we slump and our little flags are in the mud and no one picks them up. No one is going to keep running with your flag. Lucia, no one cares about your flag. I tell myself that. When you fall down it's over.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why