Quotes from Jenny Offill

There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m. One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, all the other wives think. Never. 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 with chewing gum and wire and string.

Also because I'm always saying he could quit his job if he wanted and we'll go somewhere cheap and live on rice and beans with our kid. My husband doesn't believe me about that last bit. And why should he? Once I spent $13 on a piece of cheese.

My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I'm joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It's a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody's convincing themselves it's going to be okay, it's there in the air somehow. The whole thing is more physical than mental, he tells me. Like hackles? The way a dog's hackles go up? Yes, he says.

What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

We stayed at a cheap hotel that had a view out the window more beautiful than anything I'd ever seen. The water was wickedly blue. A cliff of dark rock jutted out of the sea. I wanted to cry because I was sure I would never get to be in such a place again.

The wife reads about something called "the wayward fog" on the Internet. The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly.

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

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

She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it.

He had a melodious voice. I wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious resistance.

How do you know all this?" "I'm a fucking librarian.

If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

I'm starting to miss him. The warm hum of his body next to me in bed. Certain little jokes and kindnesses. A kind of credit or goodwill, extended and extended again and again whether or not you deserve it.

I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves "comfortable" when what they mean is decadently rich. You're so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.

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.

At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.

The days with the baby felt long but there was nothing expansive about them. Caring for her required me to repeat a series of tasks that had the peculiar quality of seeming both urgent and tedious. They cut the day up into little scraps.

The adultery book says to say affirmations of some sort each day, about yourself or your marriage. The wife doesn't like the ones that are suggested so she makes up her own. Nerves of Steel No favors for fuckers

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.

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

For fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she'd suspend her fierce judgment of the world and fall silent there. And when she did, a tiny space would clear in my head and I could think again.

Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. Little people, Edison called them. Entities.

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

Henry and I make plans to meet for coffee at the place on his block. It is hard for him to get even that far away. "I'm on house arrest," he whispers. "I'm jumping out of my skin." I wish I could give him something for his nerves, but of course, I can't. I remind myself (as I often do) never to become so addicted to drugs or alcohol that I'm not allowed to use them.