O'neill Quotes & Sayings

The day you apologise for who you are is the day you give another control over who you are. — Shane K.P. O'Neill

The home is the most ritualized place in a society; each house is like a religious order with its own ceremonies. — Heather O'Neill

Geniuses are their own saviors. — Anthony O'Neill

Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book. — Joseph O'Neill

I was always moved when mean people were suddenly nice to me. It was a weakness that would lead me into some bad relationships later in life. — Heather O'Neill

Be true to yourself always, and remain the master of your own destiny. Should you place your heart, or your hopes and dreams, in the hands of another, then you allow that person the power to crush them. When all is said and done, the only one you can truly depend on, for anything, is you. — Shane K.P. O'Neill

What's the use coming home to get the blues over what can't be helped. — Eugene O'Neill

A beige cat came down the stairs like caramel seeping out of a Caramilk bar. — Heather O'Neill

More important than the material issue ... the opening of a new, high frontier will challenge the best that is in us ... the new lands waiting to be built in space will give us new freedom to search for better governments, social systems, and ways of life. — Gerard K. O'Neill

In the first weeks of the Obama administration, 'bipartisanship' was the reigning buzzword, and when the Beltway thinks 'bipartisan,' it pictures President Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill putting aside their differences and forging a legislative partnership, a ruddy pair of genial patriarchs bonding over the Blarney Stone. — James Wolcott

The Universe and Spirit do not understand limitations ... PEOPLE invented limitations! — Jennifer 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

Now I proudly call myself a feminist. If Tip O'Neill were alive today, I might even tell him that I'm a pom-pom girl for feminism. I hope more women, and men, will join me in accepting this distinguished label. Currently, only 24 percent of women in the United States say that they consider themselves feminists. Yet when offered a more specific definition of feminism - "A feminist is someone who believes in social, political, and economic equality of the sexes" - the percentage of women who agree rises to 65 percent.16 That's a big move in the right direction. — Sheryl Sandberg

He always had to act in an obnoxiously idiosyncratic way. — Heather O'Neill

We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves. — Eugene O'Neill

Dogs ... do not ruin their sleep worrying about how to keep the objects they have, and to obtain the objects they have not. There is nothing of value they have to bequeath except their love and their faith. — Eugene O'Neill

The fatalism of the limits-to-growth alternative is reasonable only if one ignores all the resources beyond our atmosphere, resources thousands of times greater than we could ever obtain from our beleaguered Earth. As expressed very beautifully in the language of House Concurrent Resolution 451, 'This tiny Earth is not humanity's prison, is not a closed and dwindling resource, but is in fact only part of a vast system rich in opportunities ... ' — Gerard K. 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 slipped one of the shoes off, looked at the inside. Property of Antonia O'Neill Taylor. I knew it. My stepmother! The bitch meant to bury me wearing her cast off shoes! — MaryJanice Davidson

Humans were always more capable of evil than you could imagine. And they were also capable of more wonderment than you could ever fathom. People had come up with this city. And what was different between them and her? They had hands and eyes. They had imaginations. They went to bed at night, and they had funny adventures in their heads. Anything was possible. But the effects — Heather 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

The friction began at this first meeting. O'Neill was not initially impressed with Reagan and said to him, "You've been a governor of a state, but a governor plays in the minor leagues. You're in the big leagues now." (O'Neill had said the same thing to Jimmy Carter four years before.) Reagan replied, "Oh, you know, no problem there." Despite the genial response, O'Neill's comment represented the very kind of Washington haughtiness that set Reagan's teeth on edge. Aides to the president-elect were incensed. — Steven F. Hayward

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. — Eugene O'Neill

Tantalizingly, he could see a fragment of hope waving in the distance like a beckoning, large-bosomed siren offering the forbidden, heady tiramisu of freedom and the naughty, rapturous chocolate ice cream of wealth. If he could just avoid being lured onto the dangerous, ball-breaking rocks of retribution, who knew what might be possible? — Sean O'Neill

If that ghost have money I tells him never to haunt you
less'n he wants to lose it! — Eugene O'Neill

Happiness hates the timid! So does science! — Eugene O'Neill

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. — Eugene O'Neill

The cat looked at its paws and frantically back at its body, as if it had just been transformed into a cat and couldn't accept it. — Heather O'Neill

We're going to lose Social Security and Medicare if Republicans and Democrats do not come together and find a solution like Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. I will be the Ronald Reagan if I can find a Tip O'Neill. — Lindsey Graham

Our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electric display of God the Father. — Eugene O'Neill

Lucifer's breath was like fire upon his skin. His eyes bulged from their sockets and he fought hard to breathe. — Shane K.P. O'Neill

My black-headed black-eyed boy. I remember every day of you. How would I forget? — Jamie O'Neill

I don't want my kids going through what I went through - police stopping you, searching you and all that malarkey. — John O'Neill

What in the world do our clothes say about us when we put them on?" Rose said. "There's no real dignity in any of these costumes. If I'm a maid, I do what the owner of the house tells me to do. If I'm a nurse, I do whatever the doctor tells me to do. What are we as women, other than barnacles that attach themselves to higher life forms in some pathetic attempt to clean up messes? Tidy up what men have left behind - make the world a lovelier, better place for men. I would like to play a part in which I don't have a superior."
The director told Rose that she should save her philosophical speculations until after work because they were causing the male actors to lose their erections. — Heather O'Neill

I'd loved to wear jeans and t-shirts, but everybody was in the peace movement back then. And that was my ploy. I had to be careful not to say things like 'I like meat.' Actually I just wanted to drink beer and to screw. — Ed O'Neill

I'm good friends with Jay Leno, good friends with Ed O'Neill, Melanie Fiona and Russell Simmons. — Kevin Hart

Try your ideas. You might surprise yourself. — Jason O'Neill

Every ball that is kicked, Martin O'Neill will be literally kicking it — Dwight Yorke

I was very slender and small. All my friends were on the team, so I had to make it too. I was a very aggressive player. I wanted to be one of the best, but I just ended up as one of the good ones. — Ed 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

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

How a city when spun
Away from the Sun
Reminds me of the Universe — Francis O'Neill

I discovered early in life that living frightened me when I was sober. — Eugene O'Neill

Embrace iteration as the road to improvement, but don't let that lull you into rolling out poorly-thought-out crap. — Kate O'Neill

For a man, few things can compare to the act of a woman surrendering herself and giving herself completely to him. It follows then that he should find it soul-destroying when she takes that privilege away. — Shane K.P. O'Neill

You cannot afford to rely on history, you have to make it. — Martin O'Neill

The piano was just now telling me how it feels so odd when it rains. The rain can cause you to suddently feel guilty for all the tiny crimes you have committed, like not telling your friend that you love her. — Heather O'Neill

A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen. — Heather O'Neill

When working with the Universal Laws you are working with the laws of manifestation, not instant gratification ... — Jennifer O'Neill

I feel I've made the transition from model to actress, but I'm not that secure about it. Lauren Hutton, Jennifer O'Neill - we all know that a few films don't mean all that much. — Maud Adams

Vietnam is still, as it was thirty years ago, a poor country of rice paddy farms and sandy harbors, where fishermen cast nets from boats with eyes painted on the bows. It is overcrowded, prey to floods and sweatshops, dotted by modern cities and tiny hamlets of thatched huts with TV antennae. It is not a great capital of industry, or an international oil field or bread basket. There is nothing in Vietnam, now, that America truly needs. And there was even less thirty years ago. This country, these people, posed no real threat to us. It was a strange place to send our youth - not to learn a new culture or to enjoy the beaches, but to kill and be killed, to be maimed and to patch up the maimed. I am convinced that, to our government, Vietnam really, truly Didn't Mean Nothing. — Susan O'Neill

It might seem like the easier way to get rid of a poet would be just to take him out to the backyard, have him kneel between the cans with tomato plants in them and put a bullet in his brain. But they knew from history that it doesn't work to kill a writer. Every time you shoot a poet,a dozen new ones are born. It's like plucking a grey hair. — Heather O'Neill

Virgin Mary was said to have appeared there. I was pretty sure she'd had her hands joined in prayer and was crying, presumably over the inhumanity of it all, and not due to sunscreen in the eye or a loose eyelash. — Ellie O'Neill

Time is purple / Just before night. — Mary O'Neill

I didn't know how he managed to keep the weight of his secret when the burden of it was crushing me. — Heather O'Neill

Happiness can be just as contagious as misery ... — Jennifer O'Neill

When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear. — Kate 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

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

I cannot wait to come back to Glasgow. I know the place like the back of my hand. In fact, one of the jobs I had as a student was in Cineworld. And I was always at gigs in King Tut's, Nice 'n' Sleazy's and the Barras. I played Ultimate Frisbee down on Glasgow Green and pulled pints in O'Neill's on Queen Street. — Colin Morgan

All writers have the idea that they are famous. — Heather O'Neill

As a consumer an individual expresses "personal or self-regarding wants and interests"; as a citizen she expresses her "judgements about what is right or good". The mistake of market approaches to environmental problems is that they transform an issue that requires public deliberation by citizens into one to be resolved by consumer preferences. The market responds only to those preferences that can be articulated through acts of buying and selling. Hence the interests of the commercially inarticulate, both those who are contingently so (the poor) and those who are necessarily so (future generations and non-humans) cannot be adequately represented. — John O'Neill

Why is it that people think staying in a bad relationship is better than being single? Don't they know that being single is the first step to finding a great relationship? — Jennifer O'Neill

tenure at Treasury was not as successful as his career at Alcoa. Almost immediately after taking office he began focusing on a couple of key issues, including worker safety, job creation, executive accountability, and fighting African poverty, among other initiatives. However, O'Neill's politics did not line up with those of President Bush, and he launched an internal fight opposing Bush's proposed tax cuts. He was asked to resign at the end of 2002. "What I thought was the right thing for economic policy was the opposite of what the White House wanted," O'Neill told me. "That's not good for a treasury secretary, so I got fired. — Charles Duhigg

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction. — Heather 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

People thought tolerance was the opposite of intolerance. Whereas in fact it was some meaningless neutrality. A child, any child, growing up, discovering herself and the nature of her deepest, most native desires - what use was tolerance to a child? It was encouragement she needed, encouragement first to be, then to love, herself. Or himself, whichever. — Jamie O'Neill

How could I have ever loved Peg? I love you." And too late, he realized that the words he had just spoken were the truth.

He closed his eyes, holding her even more tightly, allowing himself to finally realize and identify his feelings. He was stunned by their enormity, their intensity, their power.

~Sean O'Neill — Brenda Joyce

I always found that drama, really good drama, has a lot of comedy in it. — Ed O'Neill

Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got - nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it. — Eugene O'Neill

I find that I can't help being bad. I promise and promise and promise myself that I won't be a bad person. But then I just do something bad.'
'That's because we're girls. We're supposed to only have emotions. We aren't even allowed to have thoughts. And it's fine to feel sad and happy and mad and in love- but those are just moods. Emotions can't get anything done. An emotion is just a reaction. You don't only want to be having reactions in this lifetime. You need to be having actions too, thoughtful actions. — Heather O'Neill

The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it. — Heather O'Neill

Have you noticed how Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen look nothing alike, and yet they both manage to look exactly like their father, Martin? — Ken O'Neill

I've had the school of hard knocks, and I've worked my way up to be the governor of this great state of Connecticut. — William O'Neill

Did you not look upon the world this morning and imagine it as the boy might see it? And did you not recognize the mist and the dew and the birdsong as elements not of a place or a time but of a spirit? And did you not envy the boy his spirit? For you know there can be no power over him who freely gives what another would take. Such a one has the capacity to love. Freely, naively, to say I do. — Jamie 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

Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see - and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! — Eugene O'Neill

You can teach an old dog new tricksif the old dog wants to learn. — Tip O'Neill

They do say money is the root of all evil."
I thought that was supposed to be the love of money."
There's neat for you. 'Tis them without it that loves it best. — Jamie O'Neill

In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn't get. — Heather 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

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

You better take advantage of the good cigars. You don't get much else in that job. — Thomas P. O'Neill

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. — Eugene 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

A wedding left the church and, meeting a funeral, walked three steps with the dead. — Jamie O'Neill

When she said sweet things in my ear, it would slide right down into my heart — Heather O'Neill

Doing something stupid once is just plain stupid. Doing something stupid twice is a philosophy. — Dan O'Neill

One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate - and remain forever scatheless. — Eugene O'Neill

I came to Christ when I was thirty-eight. That transformed my life. — Jennifer 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

I knew I was a good stage actor but I had no idea about movies. And I wasn't a Paul Newman type of guy. That's why I thought the stage is just right for me. — Ed O'Neill

It's always intimidating to meet an icon. — Jennifer O'Neill

The stars are always up in the sky ... then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come. — Heather O'Neill

She tugged warningly on his shirt. "I am serious! Are you going to marry me, Sean? Finally?"

He smiled, and the light of his smile filled his eyes. "Damn it, Elle! Will you not let me take the lead? Ladies do not propose marriage!"

~Sean O'Neill & Eleanor de Warenne — Brenda Joyce

Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, send your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline. — Paul O'Neill

In 1922 everything changed again. The Eskimo pie was invented; James Joyce's Ulysses was printed in Paris; snow fell on Mauna Loa, Hawaii; Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees; Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Frederick Douglass's home was dedicated as a national shrine; former heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson invented the wrench ... — Bernice L. McFadden

The old - like children - talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own! — Eugene O'Neill

When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more. — Heather O'Neill