Autoportrait Quotes

“There is a confusion between myself and the literary world about what should constitute a text. I believe (along with many other writers historically) that a text should be elusive, and that the act of reading a text should make the reader conscious of the life they are living. That is, the text should overflow its borders, demonstrating the complicity of our consciousness with the coloring of our surroundings and the supposed sequentiality of events. To write texts this way, one must stop prior to the point of total explanation.”
― Jesse Ball, Autoportrait

“am not using wonderful as a blank superlative. I mean, actually, they are full of wonder: they wonder about things, they themselves are a wonder, they produce wonders. When you ask such a person a question, you get something back that was already yours, something you had forgotten—or you get something new, something you have never encountered. In a moment it is an old friend. Really we are all like this, can all be like this. It is only our sad grasping protectiveness that makes us monsters.”
― Jesse Ball, Autoportrait

“was briefly a photographer. I do not like pictures of myself, though I have noticed that in my life there were a few people who could take very generous pictures of me. The person I saw there was someone I knew. This is not always the case. I do not”
― Jesse Ball, Autoportrait

“It is amazing to me how well people manage to find others who are similarly attractive. They do it real fast, too. Of course, similarly attractive is not an objective standard, but it is fairly objective within cultures, and using that information, people are shockingly proficient. You constantly hear people mentioning that so-and-so is out of their league, et cetera. You don’t hear this about curiosity or kindness. In fact, these qualities seem to make it harder to find a partner.”
― Jesse Ball, Autoportrait