“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.”
― Jesse Ball, quote from The Way Through Doors
“--Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!”
― Jesse Ball, quote from The Way Through Doors
“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, quote from The Way Through Doors
“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, quote from The Way Through Doors
“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, quote from The Way Through Doors
“The old man sang for a while, and Mora felt in her head the beginning of a long siege. A wilderness had crept up around a walled town, and the darkness of old woods and far-off places began to grow then, even within sight of where men walked together.
By this she meant in her heart that all the useless things one remembers well just before waking and forgets just after were in fact very important and perhaps all that stood now between herself and oblivion.”
― Jesse Ball, quote from The Way Through Doors
“It is for this girl that the young man is looking. Day after day he wakes in morning and goes searching for her. In his work, and in his life on mornings that are not miraculous and afternoons that are sundry and various, he saves the corners of his eyes for her, and watches at all times the entrances and exits of every establishment to which he comes. For he knows that eventually, in time and given some protracted period of days, weeks, and months, he will come up on her, and know her in an instant for who she is.”
― Jesse Ball, quote from The Way Through Doors
Jesse Ball
Born place: in The United States
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“Some say an army of horsemen
some an army on foot
others say ships laden for war
are the fairest things on earth.
But I say the fairest sight
on this dark earth
is the face of the one you love.
Nor is it hard to understand:
love has humbled the hearts
of the proudest queens.
And I would rather see you now
stepping over my threshold
than any soldier greaved in gold
or any iron-beaked ship.”
― Alison Croggon, quote from The Singing
“In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Skin Trade
“A future priest, I faced her as before an altar: one of her cheeks was the Epistle and the other the Gospel. Her mouth might have been the chalice, her lips the paten. All I needed to do was to say a new mass, according to a Latin that no one learns at school, and is the catholic language of mankind. Don’t think me sacrilegious, devout lady reader; the purity of the intention cleanses anything unorthodox in the style. We stood there with heaven within us. Our hands, their nerve ends touching, made two creatures one: a single, seraphic being. Our eyes went on saying infinite things, and the words did not even try to pass our lips: they went back to the heart as silently as they had come…”
― Machado de Assis, quote from Dom Casmurro
“Few in our government and in the public sector have openly confronted the threat offered by the use of but one nuclear weapon, in the hands of a determined enemy, who calibrates it to trigger a massive EMP burst. Such an event would destroy our complex, delicate high-tech society in an instant and throw all of our lives back to an existence equal to that of the Middle Ages. Millions would die in the first week alone, perhaps even you who are reading this if you require certain medications, let alone the most basic needs of our lives such as food and clean water.”
― William R. Forstchen, quote from One Second After
“I don’t . . . I don’t want to be like this anymore!” His tone was anguished. “You’re getting so much better,” she murmured. “Soon you won’t have these nightmares.” He narrowed his gaze at her, as if just noticing she was there. “You were . . . murdered—you remind me of the things I’ve done, of consequences,” he choked out. “And you show me what I could have had . . . if I’d been . . . different.” He grasped his head again and muttered, “You’re what’s wrong with my past. What must be missing from my future.” She knew he would remember little to none of these words—but she would. “Conrad, your future’s not settled. You can have good things in your life again.” “You’re the perfect punishment for me.” “Oh.” Stunned, she rose to leave. He reached out to stay her. When he closed his big fist around air, he turned and struck the headboard with frustration. Eyes vacant, burning red, he rasped, “Did any man ever want his penance so much?”
― Kresley Cole, quote from Dark Needs at Night's Edge
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