Jenny Offill quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jenny Offill on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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.

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.

What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.

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

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.

Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart.

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

Dizzying, this happiness.

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.

Mark Twain fell in love with his wife after he saw her picture painted on an ivory miniature the size of a fingernail.

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

I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

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

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.

Where did all the words go?" I asked.
"They just wasted away," my mom explained, " like a leg you never walk on.

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

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

Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live.

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.

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

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.

You know what's punk rock about marriage? Nothing. You know what's punk rock about marriage? All the puke and shit and piss.

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.

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.

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

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.

Life equals structure plus activity.

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

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

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

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

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

Out of dark waters, this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine.

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

In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.

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

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.

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.

Are animals lonely? Other animals, I mean.

There is a man who travels around the world trying to find places where you can stand still and hear no human sound.

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

Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.

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

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

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

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.

These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.

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

The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck,