Best 36 quotes of Jesse Ball on MyQuotes

A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The book will take place in the first ten minutes following his arrival.

A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

A person always has a chance to protest this or that.

As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

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

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.

I am clearer in my mind and a bit less confused than I used to be.

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.

I believe my friends think I'm funny. All the books are full of humor. Maybe it is a quiet sort of humor that masquerades as not-much-at-all. It is certainly easy to miss.

I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.

I'd say writing is easier for me now than it once was, but I do less of it.

If Americans are to read something that is difficult, they will only do so supposing they will be admired for having done it.

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

I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.

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

I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles 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.

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.

Much of my work has been done in first person.

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

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.

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

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.

…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?

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.

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.

En sevdiği oyuncağıydı. Neydi? Kırmızıya boyanmış, ufak, tahta bir kuş. Kırmızıydı, gerçekten öyleydi; tam da gün ışığında, gölgede, mumlarla, şöminenin başında ona bakan bir oğlan çocuğunu hayallere daldıracak, parlak, tatlı bir kırmızı. Ama muhabbetkuşu ya da öyle değersiz bir tür olduğunu sanmayın. Hayır, onun kuşu bir baykuştu.

…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.

It never occurred to him to wonder how there could be so many people, so many shifting groups that he only saw once in so small a village. Not matter how many such scenes played out, he didn't wonder -- for Henry had become a very particular sort of person. He had been groomed to be a person who did not ask questions. He had not been told to be that way, but all the same he had been led to it, and now that he was there, he felt a great comfort.

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

– 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.

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?

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.

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