“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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“Tell them you came, and saw, and looked
into my eyes and saw the shadow
of the guard receding.
Thoughts in time and out of season,
the hitchinker stood by the side of the road
and levelled his thumb in the
calm calculus of reason.
[...]
Why does my mind circle around you?
Why do planets wonder what it
would be like to be you?
All your soft wild promises were words,
birds, endlessly in flight.”
― Jim Morrison, quote from Wilderness: The Lost Writings, Vol. 1
“I have spoken to many parents who feared they were producing little hypocrites who were proud and self-righteous. Hypocrisy and self-righteousness is the result of giving children a keepable law and telling them to be good. To the extent they are successful, they become like the Pharisees....The genius of Phariseeism was that it reduced the law to a keepable standard of externals that any self-disciplined person could do. In their pride and self-righteousness, they rejected Christ.”
― quote from Shepherding a Child's Heart
“For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is, essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him and his own, patent.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, quote from The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It was nothing. We played tic-tac-toe for a while. You know we do that sometimes."
"Oh, I know," Teagan says.
"Okay, how did you make that sound like we were rolling around ripping off each other's clothes?”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from Something, Maybe
“When people break your heart, pride’s all you’ve got left.
And pride, could turn cold and bitter without heart.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Rising Tides
The Thief's Daughter
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Spinster: Making a L...
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The Last Mile
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