quotes by Joseph O'Neill

"Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?"
— Joseph O'Neill (Netherland)

"All those scores of barren peaks that were being revealed in the light of the lake of fire below me, how could I know if any of them led up to the earth surface?...Scores and hundreds of peaks crowding in on me, like vast sums, great rows of figures in gigantic sums of addition or subtraction.

I tried to pull myself together. My mind was wandering. I had escaped from him and from the lassoers. I mustn't let myself die in the darkness."
— Joseph O'Neill (Land Under England)

"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 (Netherland)

"New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin."
— Joseph O'Neill (Netherland)

"Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us to love?"
— Joseph O'Neill (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)

"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 (Netherland)