The Curfew Quotes

“…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. "

"What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“We are born in this cemetery, but must not despair.

-Piet Soron, 1847”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing. Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition. Did they glow with light? They did, but of course, it could not be seen. And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“…In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“The action of a thing is the same as the naming of it - is, in fact, the real name. The trees creak and they are saying, 'trees creak through the long night.' The long night - what is it? Trees creaking. There wasn't anything that tied life's moments together, except life. And when it was gone?”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“There will be no magic, whatsoever. Magic is either a poverty-stricken necessity or a wealthy fantasy. We are in neither of those straits, and what cannot be explained will be left unknown.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though violence may connect them, though pity, compassion, hope may marry one thing to another, still all that is in process cannot be judged, and that which has passed has gone beyond judgment, which leaves us again, with lives and belongings, places, shuttling here and there, hapless, benighted, discordant.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“We tire differently if we love or love not.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“Mr. Gibbons had the talent that many puppeteers have of speaking to children as though he believed they were intelligent and could understand a thing or two.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“In the next room, perhaps twenty people were sitting around, drinking what looked like wine out of wine-glasses. They were the sort of people William and Louisa used to be in the habit of knowing, a crowd of elegant furniture, like the legs of a herd of gazelle taken together, and equally useless, when all things are considered.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“For the first time in a long while, he looked down and saw his hands. If you have had this experience, you'll know just what I mean.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew