Quotes from Jenny Offill

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

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

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

My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.

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.

The adjunct seems paler than usual. He isn't speaking in complete sentences. Would it be possible to...? Do you mind if...? They say when you're lonely you start to lose words.

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

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.

My husband gets a new job.... The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. "Not bad," he says with a shrug. "Only vaguely soul-crushing.

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.

Funny how when you're married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you're anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.

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.

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

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.

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you're my mother? Sometimes you don't seem like a good enough person. He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don't know, once or twice a day.

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.

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.

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.

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

Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.

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.

It is important to remember that emotional pain comes in waves. Remind yourself that there will be a pause in between waves.

Dizzying, this happiness.