Offill Quotes & Sayings

We had told people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn't have to speak. — Jenny Offill

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

Out of dark waters, this. — Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I've read before. If I tell you that it's funny, and moving, and true; that it's as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1896, will you please simply believe me, and read it? — Michael Cunningham

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. — 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

The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wish to exist. This light could be found trapped inside a man and animals and plants, and the Manichean mission was to try to release it. Because of this, they abstained from sex, viewing babies as fresh prisons of entrapped light. — 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

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

Worms appeared on Earth more than six hundred million years ago. They were soft, small-bodied creatures that fed on nutrients at the bottom of the sea. But they were different from anything that had come before because they had heads with mouths and primitive brains. Also new were there guts and organs, arteries and veins. Today there are so many worms in the world that even if every other substance were to disappear from Earth the shape of our planet would still be outlined by them. — Jenny Offill

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

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

She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it. — Jenny Offill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling. — Jenny Offill

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

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same. — Jenny Offill

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

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

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

I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them. — 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

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

I remember that day, how you took a $50 cab from work, how you held me in the doorway until I stopped shaking. We had told people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn't have to speak. Later, you made me a dinner of all the things I hadn't been allowed to eat. Cured meat, unpasteurized cheese. Two bottles of wine, then finally, sleep. — Jenny Offill

Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My best friend came to visit from far away. She took two planes and a train to get to Brooklyn. We met at a bar near my apartment and drank in a hurry as the babysitter's meter ticked. In the past, we 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. We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people - the poets, the mystics, the explorers - were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark. — 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

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

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

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

Both have trouble working up the nerve to go into the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. — Jenny Offill

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

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

What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer. — Jenny Offill

The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck, — Jenny Offill

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

Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn't look at it. — Jenny Offill

Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. — Jenny Offill

I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer. — Jenny Offill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur. — 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

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

Are animals lonely? Other animals, I mean. — Jenny Offill

Dizzying, this happiness. — Jenny Offill

They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation. — 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

The wife has begun planning a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped writing on a grocery list She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea.
But only possibly. — Jenny Offill

Why can you hear the ocean inside a seashell? This is just a trick your ears play on you. What you hear is not the sound of the ocean, but rather the sound of your own blood rushing through your ears. All the shell does is amplify the sound so that you can hear it, the way a stethoscope lets you hear the beating of your heart. Some people say you hear the sea inside a shell because the shell remembers its home even when it has been taken away, but this is just a story. — Jenny Offill

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

Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy. Darwin — Jenny Offill

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

People mean well. That is what he believes. How then is he married to me? 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. Later, — 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

There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X. — Jenny Offill

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

I read a study once about sleep deprivation. The researchers made cat-sized islands of sand in the middle of a pool of water, then placed very tired cats on top of them. At first, the cats curled up perfectly on the sand and slept, but eventually they'd sprawl out and wake up in water. I can't remember what they were trying to prove exactly. All I took away was that the cats went crazy. — Jenny Offill

Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says. — Jenny Offill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A boy stepping into the street and opening an umbrella for a girl keeping dry in the doorway. — Jenny Offill

I read an article written by a woman living alone who got them. She talks about how depressing it is to have no one to help her with all the spraying and washing and cooking and bagging. She's spent all her money, hasn't had a date in years. I show it to my husband. "It's true. We're lucky," he says. — Jenny Offill

But lately I'm like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let's be pure of heart again! — Jenny Offill

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

Sometimes at night I conduct interviews with myself.
What do you want?
I don't know.
What do you want?
I don't know.
What seems to be the problem?
Just leave me alone. — Jenny Offill