Quotes from Jenny Offill

I got a job checking facts at a science magazine. Fun facts, they called them. The connected fibers in a human brain, extended, would wrap around the earth forty times. Horrible, I wrote in the margin, but they put it through anyway.

Those who live move.

Some nights in bed the wife can feel herself floating up towards the ceiling. Help me, she thinks, help me, but he sleeps and sleeps.

My mother told me once that each thing, each being, has two names. One is the name by which it is known in this world and the other is a secret name that it keeps hidden. But if you call it by this name it cannot help but respond. This is the name by which the creature was known in the Garden of Eden.

When three people say you are drunk, go to sleep.

Los recuerdos son microscópicos. Partículas diminutas que se agolpan y se dispersan. Gente minúscula, los llamó Edison. Criaturas. Tenía una teoría sobre su origen: llegaban del espacio exterior".

That night on the show, there's an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it's a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brain refuses to take in what is happening. This is called the incredulity response. "Those who live move," he says.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?

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.

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

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.

Advice for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.

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

And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

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.

How had she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. 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.