A Quote by Joseph O'Neill

Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
Perhaps we wouldn't eat so much, or smoke, or drink so much if we were paying attention to ourselves. Perhaps we wouldn't talk so much if we were paying attention to each other. All these oral activities are trying to meet a need, and perhaps the greatest need is to be seen and heard.
Looking back, perhaps the single biggest problem was fear. Fear of failure, fear of other people, but mostly fear of myself. It has taken sixty years to discover who I really am. It's never too late to find yourself however lost you may be.
Where there is much general deformity nature has often, perhaps generally, accorded some one bodily grace even in over-measure. So, no doubt, with the intellect and disposition, only it is frequently less apparent, and we give ourselves but little trouble to discover it.
You make a mistake, you better hope I wasn't paying attention and didn't see it, but if I catch you doing it and you think I'm not paying attention, then that's when you get in trouble.
If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?'
Unless we tell stories about ourselves, which is all that theater is, we're in deep trouble.
When I hear about something that's hot, I back away from it. So I go and discover the stuff I wasn't paying attention to five years ago.
But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it.
We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention
We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.
If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.
There's no certainty to the next couple of years, but people are paying attention now. And I want to put out a record when people are paying attention, because that's when it has the best chance of being heard.
Are you such a dreamer To put the world to rights? I'll stay home forever Where two and two always makes a five I'll lay down the tracks Sandbag and hide January has April's showers And two and two always makes a five It's the devil's way now There is no way out You can SCREAM and you can shout It is too late now Because... You have not been Payin' attention! Payin' attention! Payin' attention! Payin' attention! You have not been paying attention!
In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.
People aren't really paying attention when they're listening to your record, so unless you're shouting exactly what you want them to hear, they don't pay attention.
It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.
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