To my knowledge, I have never ridden a horse.

– Jesse Ball

Autoportrait by Jesse Ball @ Bookshop

Quotes

I like to use jars as glasses. I am completely amazed whenever I obtain another jar (by using its contents). How can it be that they give these things away? Jars are always nicer and more shapely than glasses.

Having migraines is both fortunate and unfortunate. It is unfortunate for obvious reasons: there are many times when one doesn’t want to live anymore, especially if the migraines follow one on the next, day after day. It is fortunate because the hour of life that unfolds when a migraine has passed contains such ascendancy — I doubt anyone not a migraineur has felt it. Is there any other pain so intense that passes away com pletely into harmony?

I enjoy very much seeing beavers and cormorants. Their liminality calls out to me. I read recently that beavers are going to exacerbate global warming by building dams all over the Arctic. This is the most pleasant vision of the apocalypse that I can think of.

… the sky was full of turning birds. There were thousands of them, thousands in a single flock and turning and turning in the sky. I looked around in absolute prostration-absolutely flattened in my heart and life by the enormity of what I was seeing, and I realized that there were people in the street going back and forth in the face of this spectacle, and to them it meant nothing. They could not even see it.