Godwin Quotes

“There is more to work than labor and compensation and being of service and achieving a state of flow. There is also the day-to-day human element. You want to look into the faces of your co-workers and like what you see there.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“At the station, Jean-Luc bangs the rooftop as a thank-you. I wave to him, then drive the few blocks to my new place of work. The excitement I feel as I stride away from my car is almost overwhelming. Things can change for the better as well as for the worse. Who would have foreseen, a mere few months ago, that I would find myself back in my home city, with a fine young man in my care, working for the Hillary for America campaign? President Hillary Clinton! Mr. Godwin Anibal! There is so much to look forward to.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“On the drive back, after a minute or two, Jean-Luc says, “You have a man? A boyfriend?” I don’t look at him. “A woman friend?” “The forecast is for more snow,” I say, peering out at the charcoal sky.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“This was an important part of my thinking—that becoming Godwin’s caretaker, or American mom, would benefit me, too. Pure benevolence is not sustainable. Mutually beneficial arrangements are the most durable and do the most good. I wasn’t being ironic with Jean-Luc: I have long wanted to learn how to cook properly. I could do with eating better, too. That will only happen with another person to cook for. Loss cannot be avoided, but maybe you can counteract it by letting something into your life.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“After lying there for a few minutes, I get out of bed. I lock the door of my bedroom. For many years, I’ve enjoyed a quiet, safe home of my own and on my own. No shouting, no strangers coming and going, no surprises, no sounds that are not mine or Cutie’s. I’m not afraid of Godwin. It feels good to have him under my roof. But his presence has the effect of filling me with suspense and fear. I’m grateful to him for this. It enables me to start fixing a problem that I now feel ready to fix.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“My apartment is comfortable but compact. The bedroom I’ve got ready for Godwin is on the small side. I didn’t know what a boy’s bedroom looked like, so I gave him exactly the bedroom I saw in the IKEA catalogue. I was concerned that he would be disappointed. But he immediately falls onto the twin bed and looks quite happy about it. I show him the pull-out storage drawers under the bed, and his closet, and his study desk. It is dark out. In the morning he will see a quiet, pleasant street. I ask Godwin if he would like to eat pizza for dinner—there is an excellent pizzeria nearby—and Mr. Lefebvre repeats my question to him in French. Godwin nods. Mr. Lefebvre declares, “Tonight we eat pizza. After that, madame, no more American food. No more hamburgers, no more fast food…” He is wagging his finger at me. Sushila, horrified, says, “Jean-Luc!” There is no need for her intervention. I have learned to manage overly direct individuals. “I agree with you, Jean-Luc,” I tell him. “An athlete must eat good food. I’m not good at cooking, but I’m excited to learn.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“She wasn’t a fool, Genevieve said. She wasn’t blind. I had tried to hide it from her, to obscure it from her, but the kid came with an inheritance. A big one, would be Genevieve’s guess. He probably had no clue how rich he was. He was just a little African boy, taken from his kin. That’s what I was party to, Genevieve said. I was party to the taking of an African child away from his African family. “I’m not party to anything,” I said. “No, but you contemplating it,” Genevieve said with poisonous emphasis. What I had to think on, she said, while I was contemplating helping the kid, giving him opportunities, saving him, was my motives. Only a selfish— I said, “I’m going to stop you there, Genevieve. You have a good day.” The conversation left me with a desolate feeling. I felt more strongly than ever the urge to have Godwin in my life.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“I decided to talk it over with Genevieve. It would do us good if, for once, I was the one asking for her sister’s help and advice. I was also interested in her point of view. She had never been a physical mom (a complicated, sad story), but I suspected that she had practical wisdom I didn’t have; and because her partner had two children in their twenties, I thought that maybe she had access to the special knowledge of parents.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“I told Sushila something I’d not told anyone, which was that for many years I paid my sister—paid her landlord, to be accurate—no less than three hundred bucks every month. In return for these payments I was exempted, in my mind, from having further contact with her. It was a painful, unnatural arrangement. The alternative, though, would have been a relationship in which Genevieve would never stop calling me to ask for money. That wouldn’t have been tenable.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“The basic cause of my loneliness was not my exit from the Group as such but, rather, the isolation resulting from an interior drama that I could not discuss with anyone. These secret feelings now seemed maybe a little laughable. They centered on certain high-minded notions of community that I had projected onto the Group. I had always been a practical, down-to-earth person, and never a leftist in the way of some people I knew—full of theoretical passions, full of abstract anger and hope, seeing themselves as protagonists in a drama of ideals. Wolfe was something like that. But I did respond idealistically to the co-operative movement. It was exciting to learn and affirm its principles—solidarity, self-responsibility, equity, and so on—and to put them, or discover them, at the center of my identity. I was a co-operator. And now I wasn’t.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“Then Sushila said, in an outburst, “He knew it was wrong, what his mother was doing. Taking that boy from his family. He knew better than anyone what she was like. But it in the end, he couldn’t help himself. It was the money. He saw a chance to make a fortune. He couldn’t help himself.” I wasn’t sure what she was referring to, exactly. I said peaceably, “Wolfe didn’t really strike me as a fortune-hunter type of guy.” Sushila smiled. “I love how you call him Wolfe.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“When I stepped out of the conference room, the atmosphere had changed. I knew what this meant: a new fact was in circulation. It was horrible to see the excitement in the faces of my co-workers. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it changed my perception of them, for the worse. It changed my self-perception, too. Why had I committed so much of my life to these people? There is more to work than labor and compensation and being of service and achieving a state of flow. There is also the day-to-day human element. You want to look into the faces of your co-workers and like what you see there.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“I’ll write to his partner,” Edil said. “Thank you for offering, Edil,” I said. “But writing to the next of kin is the responsibility of the most senior officer in the Group. It communicates maximum respect. That’s the etiquette. We established it after Alex Remy died. Plus, you have lost a dear friend. Everyone can see how upset you are. It wouldn’t be right to burden you.” I had to protect Wolfe’s family from this woman.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“My hair stylist, Jackie, had wanted for a long time to give me shoulder-length Fulani braids with beads. You have got a beautiful brow, she always said. I always said no. It felt too bold. It was easier just to flat iron my hair and keep things low key. But this time I called up the salon and said to Tamara, who answered the phone, “Tell Jackie I surrender.” Tamara passed on the message right away. I heard Jackie whoop in the background. We made an appointment for the following Thursday, at 10:00 a.m. The Action Committee would meet on the same day, at 5:00 p.m. I booked the appointment with Jackie because I did not want to spend the day at my desk, in suspense. I wanted Edil to be the one in a state of suspense, wondering about where I might be.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“Fulbert was not talking about the kind of hunting that the tourists did in the cynegetic zones near Pendjari—crawling around on their hands and knees to gun down buffalo, antelope, sometimes even lion.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“Fulbert was not talking about the kind of hunting that the tourists did in the cynegetic zones near Pendjari—crawling around on their hands and knees to gun down buffalo, antelope, sometimes even lion. He was talking about the communal chasse sportive.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“Lefebvre suddenly and loudly expectorates. He spits the product down into the yard. I want to catch the eye of Sushila, who is sensitive to that kind of thing. She has fallen asleep, however. I cover her with a blanket, join her on the couch, and put her bare feet on my lap. That feels good. I am at my most serene when everyone I love is nearby and asleep. Now it is just me and Lefebvre, man to man. “Go on,” I tell him. •”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“Without naming names, he, Lefebvre, is aware of a certain contemporary vedette who committed to appearing at a certain testimonial game. The event was publicized accordingly. At the last minute, the vedette announced his withdrawal, citing a trivial reason. When it was indicated to him that he had promised to attend, what was the vedette’s response? He said, I am not a slave to my words.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“I welcome the ice cream (the presence of which in our freezer was unknown to me) because it promotes a dessert effect—the sense of a meal achieving its final act. A bowl of chocolate ice cream will symbolize the last course of conversation.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“Why are you so hostile to him?” She gets wineglasses out of the cupboard. “If you want to throw him out, go ahead. But I’m not going to be rude. Besides,” she adds—and it would feel like a parting shot, if Sushila were someone who goes in for parting shots—“I’m having fun. When was the last time we had someone over?” It takes me a few seconds to regroup. Look, am I antisocial? Maybe. Do I overly discourage visits? Yes, arguably. But must I entertain, of all people, Lefebvre? Something brushes my leg.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“It is a curious fact, Lefebvre continues, that the five most populous countries in the world—China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Pakistan—even if combined, would be unable to produce a team that could win the smallest cup in a top European league.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“A few days later, she rang me at home. It was evening—I was in bed, watching TV with Cutie. When I saw the name light up on my screen, I ignored the call. She left a message. I watched some more TV, then went to sleep. I do not listen to messages last thing at night.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“Then again, almost nobody passed the test of our mockery. Almost anything said or done by anybody was in some way undermined by an unconscious assumption or blind spot or standpoint issue which the speaker or actor suffered from. Everyone was disdained, oneself especially. The performance of kicking in one’s own rotten ideological floorboards was something we called “reflexivity.” This was a cop-out, of course, but it was a smart cop-out. Being smart—which we confused with being knowledgeable—was less about seeing something for what it was than about critically viewing one’s act of seeing, and then critically viewing oneself critically viewing one’s originally seeing self, and so on infinitely, as in an Escher, without vertigo. In practice, it led to abandoning all attempts to actually absorb anything, and defaulting to an ironic or camp focus on obviously trash TV and comic books and music, and expressing a perverse but real admiration for brazenly rich or crooked or right-wing people, whom we associated with authenticity and transparency, the idea being that human beings purporting to act in good faith were either operators or people who had mistaken their lucky success for merit. It sounds unbelievable, but that’s how small-minded and envious we were. That isn’t to say that perspectivism doesn’t have value, because of course it does. But it does not solve the problem. One remains an American idiot.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“The whole drama of contactability, of being constantly in touch and constantly on call, is weighing on me. In regular life I don’t carry a phone around. My whereabouts are not exactly a big mystery. I’m a predictable, straightforward guy. At any given moment I’m most likely to be holding the fort. If I’m out, it’ll be because I’m walking the dog or buying food or briefly riding my bike. It won’t be because I’ve put on a wingsuit and thrown myself off a cliff. And if something untoward happens, the kind of hitch or holdup that afflicts countless people every day, I handle it the way grown-ups did in the millennia before portable electronic devices: by figuring it out. The bottom line is that I’m not a package to be tracked and traced.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“The experience of perceiving a soccer game must be communicated by reference to what has been previously experienced by other members of the perceptual community, i.e., soccer fans.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“Maybe becoming a latter-day Watt or Faraday or even Engelbart was trickier than we’d thought. Also, we had to contend with real life, a field that wasn’t our strength. Everything started to crumble when the most productive comrade, Nikhil, got himself a serious girlfriend, immediately nicknamed Yoko, who refused to visit our house and got Nikhil to move in with her and focus on his doctorate. He’s a professor at Stanford now, which is great; our paths never cross, which is fine. After Nikhil quit, we three remainers soldiered on for over a year, during which things went, in accordance with a law of gravity we didn’t understand, downhill.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“The final obstacle to sleep is my rage. Goddammit, I’m not sixteen anymore. Sleeping on a treadmill? Are you fucking kidding me? The person being interrogated is none other than myself. I’m not furious at my brother. Nor am I asserting some entitlement to the physical comforts that might reasonably be due a man who has achieved a certain maturity and has shouldered certain responsibilities. It is a question of autonomy—of being in the world on one’s own terms. It is a question of my failure, yet again, to ensure that I am where I want to be, in the company of the people I want to be with, in circumstances of my choosing. If there’s one thing I have learned over the years, if experience could be reduced to a single bitter apple of knowledge, it’s this: self-rule must be exercised with a tyrant’s purpose. And yet here I am in a strange home, at the mercy of the toothbrushes and toilet seats of strangers. I brought it on myself. I knew that no good would come of leaving home. I knew, dammit, that it was— “Markie?” “Mm?” “You all right?” “Mm.” “Listen up. When you meet Julie and Tony, just tell them that you’re just passing by, OK? You’re in England on business, and you’re just dropping in on your bruv.” “Why?” “It’s a delicate situation, bruv.” “Got it,” I say, although I don’t get anything.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“What I’m witnessing, it seems, isn’t scenes of civil unrest but the disorderly emptying of bars that routinely occurs on weekends in the English provinces.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“At the arrivals area, I scan the pickup signs. For some reason I always do this, even when I’m not expecting anyone to be waiting for me, and without fail I’m left with an emotion of abandonment when it’s confirmed that I am not, in fact, among those who will be picked up. But this time it’s different: Geoff has assured me that I will be met at the airport. My name is nowhere to be seen.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel

“This is the drawback of vigilance: from your watchtower you finally spy, in your binoculars, your fleeing self; and you release the hounds. There is no outrunning them—grief present and grief foreseen. There is no shelter from the interior outdoors. I speak for myself, of course, on the basis of my experiences and hunches, which is to say, my misconceptions and my stupid fears.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Godwin: A Novel