How to Set a Fire and Why Quotes

“Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what it's like to hear something like that? To hear someone say something and feel the world ripple around you?”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“We deceive ourselves into thinking life is long, but fire reminds us—it is a flickering. Life is a flickering—and then it is gone. So, we must make the most of it.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“The whole thing about people living on in memory is a crock of shit. The best you can do is try to remember what you can, and include the memories in your routines. But, sometimes that makes the real memories fade faster.

We're just running down a fucking slope carrying these little flags, and one by one we get shot and we slump and our little flags are in the mud and no one picks them up. No one is going to keep running with your flag. Lucia, no one cares about your flag. I tell myself that. When you fall down it's over.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“I want you to go out and buy yourself a lighter or a good box of matches. If they are matches, it is nice for them to be strike-anywhere matches. Those are the best kind. The lighter does not have to be a very nice one. In fact, it should be fairly nondescript, if possible. You will keep it in your pocket as a sort of token. Stick your hand in there now and then as you go around and remember: all the buildings that exist, all the grand structures of wealth and power, they remain standing because you permit them to remain. With this little lick of flame in your pocket, with this little gift of Prometheus, you can reduce everyone to a sort of grim equality. All those who ride on the high horse may be made to walk. Therefore, when you are at the bank and the bank manager speaks roughly to you, when you are denied entrance to a restaurant or other place of business, when you are made to work longer than you should need to, when you are driven out of your own little dwelling and made to live in the street, reach into your pocket, caress your own little vehicle of flame, and feel the comfort there. We shall set fires—and when we set them, we shall know why.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“Maybe you can see from this that I am quite familiar with being in detention. Matter of fact, I feel like I have always been in detention. I am an old veteran of detention, like one of Napoleon's soldiers limping back from the battle of Moscow. No, not like them--they were chumps. More like--one of the girls who died in the Triangle Fire looking out the window and realizing it is too far to jump, then jumping.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“That's the trouble with the hospital-they find all the things that have been killing you forever, and that you are okay with, you're okay with those things slowly killing you, but then they find them and get rid of them, and then other things replace the things you were fine with, and you are not fine, not fine at all with the new things, and so you die, slowly, in utter misery, just the way you would have before, only before you were pretty okay with the manner of it, but now you're not.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“I was thinking about Lucia Stanton—this person who would basically disappear. What would I call myself next? What clothes would I wear? There is that part in the Bardo Thodol where the dead person goes into a womb to be born again into a new place, where the dead person actually chooses where she will be born—whether into an animal or a human, and into which land.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“When I think about what my future holds, it is a bit like looking into the sun. I flinch away, or I don’t and my eyes get burned down a bit, like candles, and then I can’t see for a while.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“The university grounds are really beautiful. Universities always try that bullshit. They want you to think wonderful things are going on inside of them because the grounds are beautiful. In general, it is good to be suspicious of monetary displays. Large swaths of bright green well-watered grass--a thing like that is a huge lie.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“We deceive ourselves into thinking life is long, but fire reminds us-it is flickering. Life is a flickering-and then it is gone. So, we must make the most of it.

Fire is red. It is yellow. It is blue. It is black as ash, brown as seared lines on timbers. Fire is the pink of flesh, and the gray of smoke that trails. Fire is the all-color that dwells before color, that which comes when one feels a fire will be set...”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“I asked him if he had bothered to have children. He said yes, he had children. I said why if this is the result. He said I beg your pardon. I said if it leads to this, where you're a skin bag full of putrescent failing organs, and time passes quickly, it passes so quickly, and he knew that, then why have kids.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“Are we not all the same? Do we not all strive to simply have enough?”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“First thing I do when I get in a library is - I go to the stacks and nose around. The idea is - you don't know what you're interested in. That's why it's possible to be surprised. So, instead of looking for things in particular, you look for what you didn't know you liked, and then when you find it you know that you liked it, and then you are a broader person than you were before.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“That’s just how it is with history. You do things and later on when people see what you did, it looks bad.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“My aunt says that I am naturally curious. That means that I don’t need to be taught how to learn. Some people have a disadvantage at the beginning, and they are not curious. These people have trouble learning. It seems like not being curious is the worst thing of all. Curious people aren’t necessarily good at learning what you want them to learn, though. They are too busy learning about other things.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“I hate when I break my own rules. What’s the point of me being rational if I flail around like a clown?”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“A person writes down what has happened in order to know it. Then a person can find the way forward.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“the manner of exertion of the will of the ruling class is such that they do not appear responsible for the vast cruelties they inflict. Each wealthy person can cruise about seemingly innocent, despite in fact being a linchpin in a system that demoralizes and brutalizes the majority of living people. Yet when someone battles back, that person acts as part of a small machinery—the machinery of his/her individual action—and thus appears guilty. The rich, on the basis of their larger machinery of violent action, can disconnect themselves from the violence of their class warfare. The poor cannot—since they must be their own mechanisms for action.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“Just in case the letter doesn’t get all the way to you, I gave it some wings so it could fly the rest of the way.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“In general I think sadness kind of take the strength away from anger, or maybe they just waver back and forth. I don’t know. All I know is most of the time I am one or the other—angry or sad.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“We get offered so few real victories. It's a question I can't even really answer: what is the victory I want?”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“She said she hadn’t thought of that. Not finishing the test might be part of the test.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“So—a French garden, as far as I can tell, is a garden that gets tended. You know, my aunt, she walks around it slowly and bends down now and then to pull up some shit, or to stick some other stuff in somewhere. That’s a French garden. An English garden is something that used to be a French garden but that no one does anything to anymore. So, it looks run-down. Things don’t grow in proper lines. This is what they tell me. My”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“CIVILIAN OR MILITARY The governments of the world would like very much for you to make the distinction between civilian and military targets. This is interesting because they do not make that distinction when they wage their class warfare upon us. Is a family a military target when they are beaten and thrown in the street and their belongings are tossed in the gutter? There are no military targets. Likewise, there are no civilian targets. These are abstract ideas that are part of a nineteenth-century framework. We”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“The university grounds are really beautiful. Universities always try that bullshit. They want you to think wonderful things are going on inside of them because the grounds are beautiful. In general, it is good to be suspicious of monetary displays. Large swaths of bright green well-watered grass—a thing like that is a huge lie.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“Sometimes when people get to be too nice, you end up not thanking them, because you are completely tired of saying thank you. Then they become more and more hangdog and you want to thank them even less.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“The idea is—you don’t know what you’re interested in. That’s why it’s possible to be surprised. So, instead of looking for things in particular, you look for what you didn’t know you liked, and then when you find it you know that you liked it, and then you are a broader person than you were before.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“If they make you put on a suit, it's because they are going to do something horrible to you. I guarantee it.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“Yes, they put their babies inside an iron stove full of coals. So, if you see a Russian person doing something crazy, as you sometimes do, remember—they have been doing that shit forever. It’s nothing new.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why

“If you want to say, Lucia, there is no inside of the park benches, I won’t argue with you. But, then you have to say where the pigeons come from.”
― Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why