“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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“In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that’s all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us,”
― Robert Shea, quote from The Illuminatus! Trilogy
“Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you're supposed to.”
― Susan Cain, quote from Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
“In thy foul throat thou liest.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Richard III
“Leo cada carta escrupulosamente. Algunas no carecen de gravedad. Me hablan del sentido de la vida, de la supremacía del alma, del misterio de toda existencia, y por un curioso fenómeno de inversión de las apariencias, son aquellos con quienes había establecido las relaciones más triviales los que más abordan estas cuestiones esenciales. Su ligereza enmascaraba un alma profunda. ¿Acaso estaba ciego y sordo, o bien se requiere la luz de una desgracia para que un hombre se revele tal como es?”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, quote from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
“The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.”
― Ivan Turgenev, quote from Fathers and Sons
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