Quotes from Jenny Offill

I am charmed by her. She seems practically like a transcendentalist.

The pieces of glass from a wedding were meant to be saved. If the husband died first, the wife prepared his body for burial by weighting his eyelids with the shards. If the wife died first, it was the husband's job to do this. I wish

Sure, sure, I suppose I could go for someone safe," she says. "But I've never felt like this before. Never." But no one is safe, I want to tell her. Safe?

The Unitarians never kneel. But I want to kneel. Later, I do at home by my bed. The oldest and best of prayers: Mercy.

If you have not known suffering, love me.

You don't really even have a job, do you?" Ben says one day when I come home early. It's true. I could be one of those people who got fired months ago but still pretends to go to work every day.

There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if it is truly a disaster. Disaster psychologists use the term "milling" to describe most people's default actions when they find themselves in a frightening new situation.

What Wittgenstein said: What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside of this body.

The Creatives, she calls them, because she's not one; she's one of the Suits. I like the sound of it. Like there might be a rumble later.

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.

I closed my eyes and listened to it. Who is this person? I wondered.

Ben is used to my all talk, no action ways, but it took a long time to bank all that goodwill.

It is important to be on the alert for "the decisive moment," says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.

It seemed possible that we'd traveled across the world in error.

A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but he couldn't help them. "It all happened so fast," he said.

I can't bear it," she says. Margot nods. You can barely bear it, I think reflexively.

How about this motherfucking darkness?

I understood it immediately. With each step up the ladder, the step beneath it disappeared, so that the higher she rose in life, the more vertiginous her position.

Withdrawal to the desert is called anachoresis in Greek.

dukkha, which is usually translated as "suffering," can have other meanings. In Tibetan Buddhism, the word is sometimes slanted differently, she says. Instead of saying that life is suffering, they might say that life is tolerable. As in just barely.

What Martin Luther said: Faith resides under the left nipple.

For most married people, the standard pattern is a decrease of passionate love, but an increase in deep attachment. It is thought that this attachment response evolved in order to keep partners together long enough to have and raise children. Most mammals don't raise their offspring together, ur humans do.

Why would you ruin my best thing?

Don't look," he says. "I'm inventing this. No one will ever know what I have done except me.