Quotes from Jenny Offill

Would you like to be a doctor when you grow up?" I ask her. She looks at me oddly. "I'm already a doctor," she says.

found a book called Thriving Not Surviving in a box on the street. I stood there, flipping through it, unwilling to commit.

I slipped it into your papers to see if you would notice." The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention.

Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business. Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

Once ether was everywhere. The crook of an arm, say. (Also the heavens.) It slowed the movement of the stars, told the left hand where the right hand went. Then it was gone, like hysteria, like the hollow earth. The news came over the radio. There is only air now. Abandon your experiments.

What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.

But you could, if you were wrong and if you had a crooked heart, forget this most obvious and endearing thing and instead speak of a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love. You could say that was your happiest time. And if you did this then telling about this happiest of times would cause the person you most want to be happy to be unhappy.

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say. That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.

Someone had given my daughter a doctor's kit. Carefully, she takes her own temperature, places the pressure cuff around her arm. Then she takes the cuff off and examines it. "Would you like to be a doctor when you grow up?" I ask her. She looks at me oddly. "I'm already a doctor," she says.

It is during this period that people burn their houses down. At first the flames are beautiful to see. But later when the fog wears off they come back to find only ashes.

It is impossible to feel calm in cities, he believes, because we so rarely hear birdsong there. 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.

Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends.

They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.

Funny how when you're married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you're anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.

I offer her some birthday cake. She goes into the usual bit about temptation and sinfulness and maybe this and maybe that, and we have to go through every station of the fucking cross before she takes a bite of it.

My friend laughs. "I don't think they go with the way you dress." How do I dress? I wonder. Like a bus driver is the answer.

The Buddhists say that wisdom may be attained by reaching the three marks. The first is an understanding of the absence of self. The second is an understanding of the impermanence of all things. The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience.

These people long for immortality but can't wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee," she says.

Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. Little people, Edison called them. Entities. He had a theory about where they came from and that theory was outer space.

People mean well. That is what he believes. How then is he married to me? 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.

An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country. A Japanese proverb: Even an insect one-tenth of an inch long has five-tenths of a soul.

Buddhist practice includes the notion that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been each other's mothers and fathers and children and siblings. Therefore, we should treat each person we encounter as if they are our beloved.

In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.

Clothes are the only thing that separates us from animals," my mother said. "Clothes and a sense of shame.