Jenny Offill Quotes

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.

You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.

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.

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.

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

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.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

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

For years, I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.

Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.

I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.

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.

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.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

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.

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

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.

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