"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)

"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)