Census Jesse Ball Quotes

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.

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.

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?

Somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live.

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?

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.

it is not just a matter of feeling—how can this go right, what can I do to make this right, but there is also this other thing—that you think, life is truly absurd, and there really is no meaning, only objects of various size colliding in space, if they are so lucky as to be near each other.

...a name is almost always a sort of cowardice---an attempt to confine a thing to being only what it is, rather than what it may be.

[...] reason and sensical behavior are not always necessary if there exists some small flood of kindness.

However, out in the world I have come to see that 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.

The fact that he chose the images for the wall, and that he liked to look at them did not really imply that he thought the person in the photographs was himself. And, in fact, I think we as people make a kind of mistake in believing this to be true in general about photographs of ourselves. Is that really you in the photograph? Or is it someone you have a connection with? Someone you once knew, but who now is foreign to you? A person whose concerns you share in part - but who is lost and gone away?

My wife wrote me letters when we first met. We would meet every day, or nearly every day, but still she would write me letters. She thought the person she was in her letters was someone she herself did not know until the letter was written, and then it was like she was meeting herself.

How can it be, we asked ourselves again and again, that they're all so cruel to him? How can this enormous conspiracy exist where everyone has agreed ahead of time that it is completely alright to be hurtful to these harmless people who hurt no one? The situation in some ways tinges everything with the sadness of these inevitable encounters. People's ignorance was so sharp then, it is still sharp now, and many of them cannot perform so much as a basic interaction without saying something base and awful or laughing or outright turning away. It is true though that there is another side which is it made it easier to find the people who are worthwhile as they were and are in no way troubled by him and entered into an immediate camaraderie. Such a person is difficult to guess at. I would not always have known them from their appearance. For people with innate gentleness and sensitivity are often compelled to hide or disguise it.

He would sometimes become frustrated, very frustrated, because we would set goals for him, and it would happen that we, who knew nothing about what would turn out to be possible or impossible, had helped him to set a goal that was too much. This was enormously depressing for him. On the other hand, if we set goals that were too easy, then he would lose interest, or what's worse, struggle with those out of some expectation that this easier thing was as hard as some other hard thing we had recently shown to him. There had to be a happy balance, though, and we learned it in time. Mostly it was a matter of mood--keeping a strong mood of joyfulness and gratefulness, and trying not, in our attitudes or speech, to lay the world out in hierarchies.

When my wife was pregnant with my son, we had many talks about possible futures--things we would do, ways that things would go. All of this dreaming came to an absolute halt on the day of the birth when our son appeared. I don't mean to give the impression that we were unhappy, because we weren't, we weren't unhappy at all. It was just that a sheer wall had appeared confining us and our lives in certain ways that we could never have guessed at before. My wife said to me about it--I think that my whole life before was training for this.

I don't think that my wife was disappointed by my son. I don't think that she blamed herself, or blamed me. Her understanding of things was richer than that. But I do know that she sometimes wished we could have done more. There were things she had hoped to do, and now it is clear, now that she is dead; we simply did not do those things and won't. I suppose this is true of children in general, of any children, but it seems especially true of a child who must be cared for permanently. I never apologized to her for him, and she likewise never said anything to me about it. If such a feeling of unhappiness existed, it would only have been in the abstract, for the particulars were: we felt lucky to have had him, and lucky to become the ones who were continually with him, caring for him. I have read some books of philosophy in which the freedom of burdens is explained, that somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it, we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live.

When there is nothing to do you do what little there is. What little is left.

You prattle on when you should listen. You ask the questions as if the meaning of the question is obvious, rather than asking it in such a way that the person is removed past himself/herself to the place in which the answer resides. Are questions so obvious? I think not. Do not let yourself make them so.

There is a constitution that some have, and I had it---to which everything foreign is wondrous, and all that is domestic, tiresome.

..it was important to figure out what things were worth doing---and then to just do those things, don’t do any of the other ones. People will try to convince you, always they will try to convince you to do things you should on no account do. Negotiating these terrible pathways full of bad advice---it is the principal danger of youth. That and suicide.

When the person you love has died, any indication that they once lived is received gratefully, or alternatively, you want to pretend that nothing good has ever taken place in the world.

..read widely because almost nothing has been everywhere applied.

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

At all times all parts of the world are eternally fascinating.

We felt lucky to have had him, and lucky to become the ones who were continually with him, caring for him. I have read some books of philosophy in which the freedom of burdens is explained, that somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it, we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live.

In any case, this is how we ended up making our friends--by pushing away the people we thought brutal, and gathering to ourselves those we thought kind and subtle.

I smell the wet black dirt and remember days in the garden, when it would have been possible to stand and run to my wife or stand and run to my son. But I did not do so. I concerned myself with parsley or yams or pulling weeds. I had so much and all at once. There is too much light in those thoughts. Light everywhere. It obliterates me. I recoil.

I have read some books of philosophy in which the freedom of burdens is explained, that somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it, we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live.

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, isn’t it? Why should he be any different?