Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe....

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

he now paid the allowance that permitted his son to live in frugal idleness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You know what my motto is?' I didn't think people had mottoes anymore,' I said. Think fantastic,' Chuck said. 'My motto is, Think fantastic.

Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.

Hi. Thx for this. No idea. Sorry. L——, Your inquiry defeats me grammatically. Cheers.

Wie eine alte Tür weist jeder Mann von einem bestimmten Alter an historische Verwerfungen und Risse der einen oder anderen Art auf, und eine Frau, die ihn ernsthaft in Gebrauch nehmen möchte, muss darauf gefasst sein, das sie einiges zu schmirgeln und zu hobeln hat.

Meine Mutter, wiewohl wachsam und wiewohl Lehrerin, war niemand, der ausdrücklich Orientierung offerierte, und vielleicht ist es sogar ihr zuzuschreiben, dass ich Liebe ganz selbstverständlich mit einem in Schweigen verfallenen Haus assoziiere.