Silence Once Begun
Jesse Ball
Top 10 Best Quotes
“In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the trouble of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.”
“And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air.”
“The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable.”
“I will tell you it simply: he felt he was falling. He felt he fell through a succession of wells, of holes, of chasms, and that I was there at windows, and we would be together for a moment as he fell by. Then I would rush to the next window , down and down, and he would fall past, and I would see him again.”
“One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.”
“It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.”
“If some say that a man and woman must live together or that they must see each other, even that they must live in the same time in order to love, well, they are mistaken. A great lover has a life that prepares him for his love. She grooms herself for years without hope of any kind, yet stands by the crevice of the world. He sleeps inside of his own heart. She dries her hair with her tears and washes her skin with names and names and names. Then one day, he, she, hears the name of the beloved and it yet means nothing. She might see the beloved and it means nothing. But a wheel, far away, spins on thin spokes, and that name, that sight, grows solid as stone. Then wherever he is, he says, I known the name of my beloved, and it is . . . or I know the face of my beloved, and she is—there! And he returns to the place where she saw him, and she empties herself out—leaves herself like open water, beneath, past, in the distance, surrounding, able to be touched by the smallest gesture. And that is how the great loves begin. I can tell you because I have been a great love. I have had a great love. I was there.”
“I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.”
“Of silence, I can say only what I have heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave--and so speech isn't itself, but its effect, and silence is the same.”
“I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is. I believe in trying to understand such love through other loves, other loves that have existed before. Many people have made the records of these loves. Those recoreds can be found. They can be red. Some are songs. Some are just photographs. Most are stories. I have always sought after love, and longed for it. I have looked for all the kinds that may be.”
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Book Keywords:
love
