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Census

Jesse Ball

Top 10 Best 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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

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