Quotes from Jenny Offill

There are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting season. "At least most people who hunt up here hunt for food, not sport," she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her dirt road. "Why don't they farm deer?" I wonder. "Is it because they are too pretty?" She shakes her head. "It's because they panic when penned.

Something in her past that makes her want to tear things to shreds.

It is so easy now for the wife to be patient and kind to the daughter. She will never love anyone or anything more. Never. It is official.

Are animals lonely? Other animals, I mean.

There is a time between being a wife and being a divorcée, but no good word for it. Maybe say what a politician might say. Stateless person. Yes, stateless.

I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.

Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.

You know what's punk rock about marriage? Nothing. You know what's punk rock about marriage? All the puke and shit and piss.

She has never liked me because I don't have a proper degree. Feral librarians, they call us, as in just wandered out of the woods.

If only I'd remembered that old proverb: When three people say you are drunk, go to sleep.

I read an article written by a woman living alone who got them. She talks about how depressing it is to have no one to help her with all the spraying and washing and cooking and bagging. She's spent all her money, hasn't had a date in years. I show it to my husband. "It's true. We're lucky," he says.

Life equals structure plus activity.

In the first class I ever took with Sylvia, she told us about assortative mating. Meaning like with like—depressive with depressive. The problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. Like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. The question being: Is this really the room you want to spend your life in?

Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live.

Ben told me once that the Greeks had this term, epoché, meaning "I suspend judgment." Useful for those of us prone to making common cause with strangers on buses. Sudden alliances, my brother calls them. I have to be careful. My heart is prodigal.

Both have trouble working up the nerve to go into the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings.

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

Once sadness was considered one of the deadly sins, but this was later changed to sloth. (Two strikes then.)

My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn't want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here. …

Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.

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

She told me that at the end of death there was a long tunnel and in it awaited everyone you ever loved. But if you never loved anyone there was just an empty room.

Much of the population was in a mild stupor, depressed, congregating in small unstable groups, and prone to rumors of doom. But I don't know. That's pretty much every day here.

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.