Jesse Ball

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

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

“– 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“…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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“I love to reread, even more than I like to read, so keeping a hold of books that I adore is very important, although they flee from me - they are always fleeing.”

“There's a misunderstanding about what nonsensical things are - the idea that they're just funny, and that's the beginning and the end of it. Nonsense is not 'not sense' - it operates at the edge of sense. It teems with sense - at the same time, it resists any kind of universal understanding.”

“I think the lies I make the most are in regards to my hopes and intentions for myself. As for lies I tell other people - I will certainly tell lies. When somebody is very ill and looks awful, and you tell them they look nice. Or if you just ate the last cookie, if someone asked me if I ate the last cookie, I would definitely lie about that.”

“Books should have a purpose. Books should be practical in some sense.”

“As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: 'Leaves of Grass - 1855;' 'Duino Elegies;' 'The Captive & The Fugitive;' 'The Castle.'”

“Lying is our stock-in-trade as social creatures.”

“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?”

“New York feels like sometimes it's not part of the United States. So does L.A. Chicago feels like it's a big city that's part of America.”

“The crucial thing in any work of any kind is that it must be a gift - the reader must possess it even more than the person who wrote it. It must be given completely.”

“…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.”

“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.”