Phil Hogan > Quotes

“The only difference between the sane and the insane is how many people you can get to agree with you.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“I have to smile when newspapers--so predictable in their attempt to explain the behaviour of those transgressing social norms or the workings of the deviant mind--speak of the 'double life' led by this furtive criminal or that. In fact the reverse is true. It is normal people who have a 'double life'. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had--the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can't have something the more you desire it, you are never happy.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“…progress isn't necessarily about change but about things turning out as we want them to”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“It’s not so much remembering as wondering how I am remembered, even as a phantom, by others.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“The foreboding had started. And with it a gnawing sense of waste. Without question, it would come to pass, what I had endeavoured to save myself from, avowed my faith against. Loss of love.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“hidden cameras, wires or microphones are used in the making of my ‘art’. I don’t peep through windows. Where is the pleasure in that? I am not a stalker, or a voyeur. I am simply sharing an experience, a life as it happens. Think of me as an invisible brother or uncle or boyfriend. I’m no trouble. I may be there when you are, or when you are gone, or more likely just before you arrive. I agree it is an idea that takes some getting used to. But do we not all have a life to make, to mould it somehow around that of others, to search for the dovetail that seems best to fit? Who could argue with that?”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“Afterwards there is hell to pay, as my father sometimes says. Aunt Lillian is screaming, which makes me cry. My father now is shaking me. The television is on behind me, showing the programme with monsters. Later Mrs Holt takes me to her house for a biscuit and some milk. Later the baby is gone, and Riley too. My father’s face, which is nearly always red, is as white as my mother’s when she was lying still on the bed. Riley has mothered the baby, I hear someone say. Because the baby has no mother. That is why they have both gone.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“After all, things don’t actually conspire to give you this life or that. Life may look like a pattern from the inside (no doubt a rat will think it wondrous that Nature has gone to the trouble of building it a maze of underground pipes to live in) but no one is really pulling levers. I prefer to see myself as author of my own fate. I am looking for no one to blame. Or indeed thank.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“The truth was, my aunt knew little about what I had done. Guessing at it was enough to horrify her, to feed her imagination, her fear of what I might one day do.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“I have to smile when newspapers – so predictable in their attempt to explain the behaviour of those transgressing social norms or the workings of the deviant mind – speak of ‘the double life’ led by this furtive criminal or that. In fact the reverse is true. It is normal people who have a ‘double life’. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had – the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can’t have something the more you desire it, you are never happy.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“Which is why I have made it my business to look further into things, to do good and put things right that are wrong. Perhaps my aunt would have died more peacefully had she condemned a little less and loved a little more.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“Perhaps you think I am haunted by the past. On the contrary, I draw from its proximity and heart. All the lessons I have learned are there.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“I went into the garage, brought back the golf club – a wood, judging by its bulging face (if memory served, from a summer camp in Scotland Aunt Lillian once sent me to) – took the measure of its heft and length and finished Sharp off with a single firm swing to the temple. I swear I could hear the chimes of an ice-cream van. You know what you did. Oh dear God, if she could see me now.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“Now in their mid-forties, and better off than ever, they seemed to me stranded between possible bad choices: not just between grandstanding and downsizing, but between staying in this marriage for the rest of their lives or breaking free of it. In their terse exchanges about décor or room size you saw a larger sense of purpose draining away. They were looking for something, but a new home together wasn’t it. Rather, they seemed engaged in a passive war of attrition, with house-hunting as their chosen weapon.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“won’t say I was simply going through the motions. As I have pleaded earlier, I am only flesh and blood. But I freely confess (without burdening you with excessive detail) that those primal urges were driven as much by thoughts of being secreted aloft in that dim mustard quiet beneath the skylight with an ear to the floor, listening to our muffled tender couplings, as her actual yielding naked presence beneath me.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“The truth is that death is never far away. It cannot be helped. I have learned that much.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“I know now that you can’t know everything about everyone. You have to think of it as a thrilling, ongoing project. Crossing the threshold of a strange house is like the opening line of a gripping story. At its best, penetrating deeper, it is like falling in love.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“A tear sprang to my eye. I was grieving. Not for something I no longer wanted but for the feeling it had once given me but which had now gone.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“Perhaps I just want to emphasize my feeling, in common with most people, that progress isn’t necessarily about change but about things turning out as we want them to.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“Нормалните хора са тези, които водят „двойствен живот“. На повърхността е всекидневният живот — ходенето на работа, отиването на почивка. После идва животът, който желаеш да имаш — животът, който те държи буден нощем с надежда, амбиция, планове, напрежение, негодувание, завист, съжаление. Един по-динамичен живот на желания, движен от мисли за предстоящи възможности. Живот, който не можеш да имаш никога. Постоянно променящ се и недостижим във всеки един момент. Иска ви се да имате повече пари? Заповядайте, възползвайте се! Атрактивен сексуален партньор? Никакъв проблем. По-високо положение в обществото? По-високо ниво на интелигентност? По-бели зъби? Обсебени сте от това, до което не можете да се докоснете. Място, което сърби, а не можете да почешете. Измъчвани от принципа, че колкото по-невъзможно е да имате нещо, толкова повече го желаете, така и не можете да се почувствате щастливи.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“What is life without the unexpected crash of something to remind us of how the rug can be pulled from under you in an instant?”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling