Jesse Ball Quotes & Sayings

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

#2. 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.

Jesse Ball

#3. 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

#4. We are born in this cemetery, but must not despair.
-Piet Soron, 1847

Jesse Ball

#5. 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.

Jesse Ball

#6. There will be no magic, whatsoever. Magic is either a poverty-stricken necessity or a wealthy fantasy. We are in neither of those straits, and what cannot be explained will be left unknown.

Jesse Ball

#7. - 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.

Jesse Ball

#8. 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.

Jesse Ball

#9. - 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.

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

#11. 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

#12. 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?

Jesse Ball

#13. 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.

Jesse Ball

#14. -A hermit always longs for visitors, said Loring,until they come, and then he wishes them gone.

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

#16. 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.

Jesse Ball

#17. Muscles are the way the body obeys the mind.

Jesse Ball

#18. 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

#19. 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.

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

#21.
Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!

Jesse Ball

#22. Much of the speech we do is largely meaningless and is just meant to communicate and validate small emotional contracts.

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

#24. 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.

Jesse Ball

#25. ... 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.

Jesse Ball

#26. 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.

Jesse Ball

#27. 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

#28. 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, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.

Jesse Ball

#29. 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.

Jesse Ball

#30. 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

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

Jesse Ball

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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.

Jesse Ball

#35. 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.

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

#38. 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

#39. I mean that the book had better make life better better in at least six or seven definite ways immediately. Also, there had better be somewhere in it a method for handling fortune and chance so as to best provoke the most complicated, involved, and glorious refractions of what's possible.

Jesse Ball

#40. 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

#41. The old man began to sing. His voice was very lovely and obviously a part of something that the world had disposed of in its haste, evidence of a grander, kinder past.

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

#43. Mr. Gibbons had the talent that many puppeteers have of speaking to children as though he believed they were intelligent and could understand a thing or two.

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

#45. It is an enduring satisfaction for our species to make little systems and tend to them.

Jesse Ball

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

Jesse Ball

#47. 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.

Jesse Ball