The Lesson Quotes

“Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn’t what is or what was.”
― Jesse Ball, The Lesson

“The trouble is, as you get older, the people you like die and are not replaced with others, so that it is easily possible to end up with no one at all to talk to, or at least, no one you would want to hear responding to whatever it is you might have ended up saying.”
― Jesse Ball, The Lesson

“Much of the deep depression that surrounds us in life has to do with this one thing — that we can’t even see the smallest plainest objects.”
― Jesse Ball, The Lesson

“The students appeared to be ten or eleven. They were playing some trust game where the students would fall from things and be caught, or get wrapped up in a bag and dragged around and then released.

-I have never understood these games, said Loring. I don't know why you would want to make children more trusting. That is their principle fault to begin with.”
― Jesse Ball, The Lesson

“-A hermit always longs for visitors, said Loring,until they come, and then he wishes them gone.”
― Jesse Ball, The Lesson

“For where he had been the largeness of her life, now his loss was; his loss was, and the worth of what he had been: those two things together became the core”
― Jesse Ball, The Lesson

“One is expecting something , and can’t say what — yet when one sees it , one knows what one knew , what one knew and couldn’t say . It is this way with death . It is in our nature to feel the extent of it when we face it , and to have it fall away the moment we turn”
― Jesse Ball, The Lesson

“A statue in the center of a town: sometimes is a god, and other times, it is something upon which to hang laundry.”
― Jesse Ball, The Lesson