Jesse Ball Quotes

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

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?

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

The action of a thing is the same as the naming of it - is, in fact, the real name. The trees creak and they are saying, 'trees creak through the long night.' The long night - what is it? Trees creaking. There wasn't anything that tied life's moments together, except life. And when it was gone?

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 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.

No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution.

…In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it.

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.

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.

…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?

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.

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

– 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.

I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.