“I was sitting on the floor, my shoes stupidly pointing at the ceiling. The yelping of emergency vehicles welled up from the street, flooded the room, ebbed one yelp at a time. I said disastrously, 'Is there anything I can… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
“There was, apparently, a nuclear reactor at a place called Indian Point, just thirty miles away in Westchester County. If something bad happened there, we were constantly being informed, the 'radioactive debris', whatever this might be, was liable to rain… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
“...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… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
“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… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
“Like an old door, ever man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
“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 fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share
“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… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable. — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
“A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attaches itself to this slow climb to the zenith, and we are not so foolishly ironic, or confident, as to miss the opportunity to glimpse significantly into the eyes of the other and share the thought that occurs to all at this summit, which is, of course, that they have made it thus far, to… — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share
“...bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws.” — Joseph O'Neill Copy Share Image
