Quotes from Jenny Offill

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

It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth.

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.

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. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah's Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.

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.

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

The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on.

What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

What did you do today, you'd say when you got home from work, and I'd try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.

When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, But aren't you afraid you're going to get lonely? Get?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Always the danger for me in life and in art is not to be brave. I am not a naturally brave person. I have to will myself not to hole up in my house and read my life away.

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

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.

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.

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.'