“ 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… Joseph O'Neill
“ 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
“ 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
“ Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time. Joseph O'Neill
“ 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 li… Joseph O'Neill
“ 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… Joseph O'Neill
“ She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade—my shoulder blade!—as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fa… Joseph O'Neill
“ 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 smal… Joseph O'Neill
“ ...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
“ 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 curr… Joseph O'Neill
“ 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 c… Joseph O'Neill
“ 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 seem… Joseph O'Neill
