Joseph ONeill quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Joseph ONeill

Top Joseph ONeill Quotes

Browse top 14 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Joseph ONeill.

Favorite Joseph ONeill Quotes

1. "Perhaps the relevant truth- and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and 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

2. "...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

3. "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

4. "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

5. "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

6. "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

7. "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

8. "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

9. "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

10. "Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?" ~ Joseph O'Neill

11. "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

12. "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

13. "The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not the twelve-year-old, though. He shifted and lay on his back and decided to look up at the sky. What he saw took him by surprise. He was basically a city kid. He had never really seen the night sky for what it is. As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.I was just a boy, I said to my wife in a hotel room in Cornwall. I was just a boy on a boat in the universe." ~ Joseph O'Neill

14. "Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time." ~ Joseph O'Neill

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Today's Quote

We'll need to clarify for the record, that I'm a pretend girlfriend. Pretend," she demands. "Got it? If you're giving me that goofy look because you think there are going to be benefits as part of this deal, you can just hold it right there! Pretend girlfriend. Say it with me." I shake my head at her outrageous comments. "Please. I've got that understood." "Good."
Author: Anne Eliot