Jenny Offill Quotes

“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

“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

She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

— Jenny Offill

“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

“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

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

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

“The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.”

— Jenny Offill

“It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth.”

— Jenny Offill

“Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.”

— Jenny Offill

“There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.”

— Jenny Offill

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

“I met an Australian who said he loved to travel alone. He talked about his job as we drank by the sea. When a student gets it, when it first breaks across his face, it's so fucking beautiful, he told me. I nodded, moved, though I'd never taught anyone a single thing. What do you teach, I asked him. Rollerblading, he explained.”

— Jenny Offill

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

“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

“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

Are animals lonely? Other animals, I mean.

— Jenny Offill

“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

“The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.”

— Jenny Offill

“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

“What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.”

— Jenny Offill

“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

“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

“Clothes are the only thing that separates us from animals," my mother said. "Clothes and a sense of shame.”

— Jenny Offill

“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

“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

“Found a book called Thriving Not Surviving in a box on the street. I stood there, flipping through it, unwilling to commit.”

— Jenny Offill

“Out of dark waters, this.”

— Jenny Offill

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

“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

“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

“The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.”

— Jenny Offill

“A boy stepping into the street and opening an umbrella for a girl keeping dry in the doorway.”

— Jenny Offill

“Life equals structure plus activity.”

— Jenny Offill

Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on the slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die.

— Jenny Offill

If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds.

— Jenny Offill

We're married, remember? Nobody's breaking up with anybody.

— Jenny Offill

“Once when she was just learning to talk, I ran my hand across her face, naming every part of it. Later, when I put her in the crib, she called me back. First, she asked for water, then for milk, then for kisses. "It hurts. Don't go," she said. "What does? What hurts, sweetie?" She paused. "My eyelashes.”

— Jenny Offill

“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

“That night, she told me the old story again about the woman who had been left behind on a desert island by the man she loved. She waited for him to return for many years, surviving on seaweed and sand, until at last she grew so small she could fit herself inside a bottle and roll into the sea. Who found the bottle, I wondered, but my mother said no one knew what happened to it or where the woman had wanted to go. A fish could have swallowed the bottle, she said, or it could have been dashed against rocks. Other possibilities: sharks, mermaids, lonely sailors at sea.”

— Jenny Offill

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

“When my father saw my bloody elbows and knees, he tried to talk me out of flying. "People aren't cut out for it," he explained. "Our bodies are designed all wrong." I didn't believe him. He was the one who had told me about bumblebees, how their wings were too flimsy to support their fat bodies; yet, in the summer, they were everywhere, buzzing impossibly by.”

— Jenny Offill

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.”

— Jenny Offill

What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.

— Jenny Offill

“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

“When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.”

— Jenny Offill