Top 100 Offill's Quotes
#1. In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.
Nancy Willard
#2. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.
Jenny Offill
#3. You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.
Jenny Offill
#5. Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it.
Jenny Offill
#6. I like to write from midnight to dawn with great stores of candy and Red Bull laid in ... I'm not sure why I have the work habits of a 20-year-old coder, but no matter how many times I set up a more reasonable schedule, I always fall back to this.
Jenny Offill
#7. The Buddhists say that wisdom may be attained by reaching the three marks. The first is an understanding of the absence of self. The second is an understanding of the impermanence of all things. The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience.
Jenny Offill
#8. Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.
Jenny Offill
#9. Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart.
Jenny Offill
#10. I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer.
Jenny Offill
#11. We used to call her Little, Little come here, we'd say. Little, unhand the cat, but then one day she won't let us, "I am big," she says and her face is stormy.
Jenny Offill
#12. Once my mother had asked me, "Is it better to burn to death or freeze to death?" and the right answer was freeze because at the very end there was a trick that made you think you were warm.
Jenny Offill
#13. There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.
Jenny Offill
#14. Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.
That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.
Jenny Offill
#15. We're married, remember? Nobody's breaking up with anybody.
Jenny Offill
#16. Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to take yourself more seriously.
Jenny Offill
#17. In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs.
Jenny Offill
#18. This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won't just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.
Jenny Offill
#19. I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.
Jenny Offill
#20. What would it be like to make it so late into life before trouble hit? To always have someone on the front porch, calling you to dinner? The husband doesn't have even a touch of this raised-by-wolvesness.
Jenny Offill
#21. Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy. Darwin
Jenny Offill
#22. She told me that at the end of death there was a long tunnel and in it awaited everyone you ever loved. But if you never loved anyone there was just an empty room.
Jenny Offill
#23. The adultery book says to say affirmations of some sort each day, about yourself or your marriage. The wife doesn't like the ones that are suggested so she makes up her own.
Nerves of Steel
No favors for fuckers
Jenny Offill
#24. I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere. It
Jenny Offill
#25. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves "comfortable" when what they mean is decadently rich.
Jenny Offill
#26. If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds.
Jenny Offill
#27. Also because I'm always saying he could quit his job if he wanted and we'll go somewhere cheap and live on rice and beans with our kid. My husband doesn't believe me about that last bit. And why should he? Once I spent $13 on a piece of cheese.
Jenny Offill
#28. The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on.
Jenny Offill
#29. These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.
Jenny Offill
#30. A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.
Jenny Offill
#31. In those last weeks, we drove without talking, trying to outride the heat, each alone in the dream the city had become. I was afraid to speak, to touch his arm even.
Jenny Offill
#32. We had told people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn't have to speak.
Jenny Offill
#33. It is impossible to feel calm in cities, he believes, because we so rarely hear birdsong there. Our ears evolved to be our warning systems. We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching.
Jenny Offill
#34. And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.
Jenny Offill
#35. Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn't look at it.
Jenny Offill
#36. The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.
Jenny Offill
#37. For fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she'd suspend her fierce judgment of the world and fall silent there. And when she did, a tiny space would clear in my head and I could think again.
Jenny Offill
#38. But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.
Jenny Offill
#39. The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)
Jenny Offill
#40. It is so easy now for the wife to be patient and kind to the daughter. She will never love anyone or anything more. Never. It is official.
Jenny Offill
#41. The thing is this: Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him. "It was a fucking miracle that I found him," she tells the philosopher.
Jenny Offill
#42. If I had to sum up what he did to me, I'd say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. Both when he loved me and when he didn't.
Jenny Offill
#43. What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.
Jenny Offill
#44. You know what's punk rock about marriage? Nothing. You know what's punk rock about marriage? All the puke and shit and piss.
Jenny Offill
#45. Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.
Jenny Offill
#46. Get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I've jotted down a few of them. Objects create happiness. The animals are pleased to be of use. Your cities will shine forever. Death will not touch you.
Jenny Offill
#47. In the past, we'd talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world.
Jenny Offill
#48. In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.
Jenny Offill
#49. A sparrow's heart beats four hundred and sixty times a minute. A man's, just seventy-eight. But sometimes, at night, my heart approached sparrow speed. This happened when the darkness crept into my bed and wrapped itself around my feet.
Jenny Offill
#50. But lately I'm like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let's be pure of heart again!
Jenny Offill
#51. One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'
Jenny Offill
#52. We stayed at a cheap hotel that had a view out the window more beautiful than anything I'd ever seen. The water was wickedly blue. A cliff of dark rock jutted out of the sea. I wanted to cry because I was sure I would never get to be in such a place again.
Jenny Offill
#53. How is that even possible?" the philosopher says. "He's one of the kindest people I've ever met." She knows. She knows. So it begs the question, doesn't it? Did she unkind and ungood and untrue him?
Jenny Offill
#54. There is a picture of my mother holding me as a baby, a look of naked love on her face. For years, it embarrassed me. Now there is a picture of me with my daughter looking exactly the same way.
Jenny Offill
#55. They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.
Jenny Offill
#56. The wife reads about something called "the wayward fog" on the Internet. The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly.
Jenny Offill
#57. My friend laughs. "I don't think they go with the way you dress." How do I dress? I wonder. Like a bus driver is the answer.
Jenny Offill
#58. The days with the baby felt long but there was nothing expansive about them. Caring for her required me to repeat a series of tasks that had the peculiar quality of seeming both urgent and tedious. They cut the day up into little scraps.
Jenny Offill
#59. What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.
Jenny Offill
#60. Would you like to be a doctor when you grow up?" I ask her. She looks at me oddly. "I'm already a doctor," she says.
Jenny Offill
#61. Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.
Jenny Offill
#64. There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, the other wives think. Never.
Jenny Offill
#65. Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.
Jenny Offill
#66. It is easy in retrospect to see why he'd want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long period of time a hair shirt woven out of her own hair.
Jenny Offill
#67. But the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine.
Jenny Offill
#68. What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.
Jenny Offill
#69. Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.
Jenny Offill
#70. Clothes are the only thing that separates us from animals," my mother said. "Clothes and a sense of shame.
Jenny Offill
#71. My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off of it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails later at the hospital.
Jenny Offill
#72. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.
Jenny Offill
#73. We are as tired of each other's company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience... I know that this depression will increase.
Jenny Offill
#74. I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.
Jenny Offill
#75. I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.
Jenny Offill
#76. My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
Jenny Offill
#77. I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
Jenny Offill
#78. I can be bolder on the page, as a character. I can gnash my teeth, I can scream and yell, in a way that I'm perhaps too timid to do in real life.
Jenny Offill
#79. That night on TV, I saw the tattoo I wished my life had warranted. If you have not known suffering, love me. A Russian murderer beat me to it.
Jenny Offill
#80. You think that the mental anguish you are experiencing is a permanent condition, but for the vast majority of people it is only a temporary state. (But what if I'm special? What if I'm in the minority?)
Jenny Offill
#81. I slipped it into your papers to see if you would notice. The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention.
Jenny Offill
#82. The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.
Jenny Offill
#83. Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.
Jenny Offill
#84. A boy stepping into the street and opening an umbrella for a girl keeping dry in the doorway.
Jenny Offill
#85. Birds are colder than animals that live on the earth, because they are not conceived in such intense and heated desire. Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere.
Jenny Offill
#86. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.
Jenny Offill
#87. Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live.
Jenny Offill
#88. Where did all the words go?" I asked.
"They just wasted away," my mom explained, " like a leg you never walk on.
Jenny Offill
#89. Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends.
Jenny Offill
#90. Are animals lonely? Other animals, I mean.
Jenny Offill
#91. Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.
Jenny Offill
#92. There is a man who travels around the world trying to find places where you can stand still and hear no human sound.
Jenny Offill
#93. An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country. A Japanese proverb: Even an insect one-tenth of an inch long has five-tenths of a soul. My
Jenny Offill
#94. The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck,
Jenny Offill
#95. Mark Twain fell in love with his wife after he saw her picture painted on an ivory miniature the size of a fingernail.
Jenny Offill
#96. Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.
Sam Lipsyte
#97. A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.
Jenny Offill
#98. At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.
Jenny Offill
#99. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.
Jenny Offill
#100. I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves "comfortable" when what they mean is decadently rich. You're so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.
Jenny Offill
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