Joseph O'Neill Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 56 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Joseph O'Neill.
Famous Quotes By Joseph O'Neill
Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble. — Joseph O'Neill
Hi. Thx for this. No idea. Sorry. L - , Your inquiry defeats me grammatically. Cheers. — Joseph O'Neill
As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world. — Joseph O'Neill
A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attaches itself to this slow climb to the zenith, and we are not so foolishly ironic, or confident, as to miss the opportunity to glimpse significantly into the eyes of the other and share the thought that occurs to all at this summit, which is, of course, that they have made it thus far, to a point where they can see horizons previously unseen, and the old earth reveals itself newly. Everything is further heightened, as we must obscurely have planned, by signs of sundown. — Joseph O'Neill
We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life? — Joseph O'Neill
The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium. — Joseph O'Neill
It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe ... — Joseph O'Neill
I think if you're writing about cricket, you're obviously writing about power, because cricket is such a loaded sport, much more so than soccer. — Joseph O'Neill
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable. — Joseph O'Neill
I see, I tell him, looking from him to Rachel and again to him.
Then I turn to look for what it is we're supposed to be seeing. — Joseph O'Neill
I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man. — Joseph O'Neill
The text makes plain in straightforward terms that I'm signing papers as a mechanical agent; that my signature should for all substantive (as opposed to formal) purposes be treated as that of my principal (i.e., the relevant Batros(es)); that although I might be aware in very broad terms of the nature of the documents, I have no personal knowledge of their contents or any authority or expertise applicable to the contents; that I have accepted my mechanical agency on the basis of appropriate assurances received from my principal as to the lawfulness, efficacy, and adequacy of the papers I sign and the actions or outcomes connected to them; and that my principal, not I, bears all and any relevant responsibility and liability. — Joseph O'Neill
I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible. — Joseph O'Neill
It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you were never going to set foot in Ireland again. — Joseph O'Neill
Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time. — Joseph O'Neill
I felt above all, tired. Tiredness: if there ws a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness ... A banal state of affairs, yes-but our problems were banal, the stuff of women's magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women's magazines. — Joseph O'Neill
There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight. — Joseph O'Neill
The word "Yankee" itself, I was informed, came from that simplest of Dutch names - Jan. — Joseph O'Neill
The general ignominy that is the corollary of insight, i.e., the ignominy of having thus far lived in error, of having failed, until the moment of so-called insight, to understand what could have been understood earlier, an ignominy only deepened by prospective shame, because the moment of insight serves as a reminder that more such moments lie ahead, and that one always goes forward in error. — Joseph O'Neill
But surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable kind of homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that cannot be located in spaces of geography or history; and accordingly it's my belief that the communal, contractual phenomenon of New York cricket is underwritten, there where the print is finest, by the same agglomeration of unspeakable individual longings that underwrites cricket played anywhere
longings concerned with horizons and potentials sighted or hallucinated and in any event lost long ago, tantalisms that touch on the undoing of losses too private and reprehensible to be acknowledged to oneself, let alone to others. I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice. — Joseph O'Neill
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day. — Joseph O'Neill
I'm tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it's the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs and their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and, I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection that bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects. — Joseph O'Neill
I am vertiginously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything would go to hell. — Joseph O'Neill
I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes. — Joseph O'Neill
I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer. — Joseph O'Neill
Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for. I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy. — Joseph O'Neill
Like an old door, ever man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing. — Joseph O'Neill
There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those. — Joseph O'Neill
Bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws. — Joseph O'Neill
It takes a long, long time to write what I do write. — Joseph O'Neill
If you cannot point to a particular actual or imagined room, among the billions of rooms in the world, and state truthfully, Inside that room I will find joy - well, then you have found a useful measure of where you stand in the matter of joy. And in the matter of rooms, too. — Joseph O'Neill
I am too tired to explain that I don't agree
to say that, however much of a disappointment Chuck may have been at the end, there were many earlier moments when this was not the case and that I see no good reason why his best self-manifestations should not be the basis of one's final judgement. We all disappoint, eventually. — Joseph O'Neill
It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves. — Joseph O'Neill
We were trying, as I irrelevantly analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington — Joseph O'Neill
No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory - a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story. — Joseph O'Neill
Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery. — Joseph O'Neill
People in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into. — Joseph O'Neill
The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague. — Joseph O'Neill
I am vertigiously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything wpold go to hell. — Joseph O'Neill
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you. — Joseph O'Neill
Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last - as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted. — Joseph O'Neill
I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods. — Joseph O'Neill
In a weekend-long lingual-legal rage, I composed a heartless, fearless, terrifying work of negation that burdened every person save myself with every conceivable responsibility and loss and risk, that in every instance unfairly and unlimitedly and gratuitously and disproportionately favored me at the expense of the world and, most repellently of all, that withheld the basic hospitality of writing: my disclaimer, as completed, was a graphic monstrosity, a cruelly rambling, almost agrammatical near-balderdash of baffling dependent clauses and ultra-boring, ultra-technical phraseology that enveloped the reader in a dingy, alien, almost unbreathable word-atmosphere offering barely a vent of punctuation, indentation, or line breakage. — Joseph O'Neill
If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it. — Joseph O'Neill
New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin. — Joseph O'Neill
Only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally industrious dummy stand-in who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all the others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own. — Joseph O'Neill
I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed. — Joseph O'Neill
I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead. — Joseph O'Neill
For those under the age of 45 it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment - or, if they hadn't, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer's arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. — Joseph O'Neill
Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love? — Joseph O'Neill
Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway. — Joseph O'Neill
My instinct was to keep him at a distance, at that distance, certainly, that we introduce between ourselves and those we suspect of neediness. — Joseph O'Neill
After a couple of somehow frightening evenings over the course of which each of us was, there can be little doubt, impressed more and more powerfully by the mental illness of the other, we restricted our friendship to the stairs. — Joseph O'Neill
I was just a boy on a boat in the universe. — Joseph O'Neill