Quotes from Jenny Offill

I keep forgetting to get glasses. It makes my husband crazy. I ask my most stylish friend to come with me to pick them out. The salesman wants me to buy bright blue ones. Fashion forward, he calls them. 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.... I get glasses that are a little bit fashion backward.

Once when she was just learning to talk, I ran my hand across her face, naming every part of it. Later, when I put her in the crib, she called me back. First, she asked for water, then for milk, then for kisses. "It hurts. Don't go," she said. "What does? What hurts, sweetie?" She paused. "My eyelashes.

I remember that day, how you took a $50 cab from work, how you held me in the doorway until I stopped shaking. We had told people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn't have to speak. Later, you made me a dinner of all the things I hadn't been allowed to eat. Cured meat, unpasteurized cheese. Two bottles of wine, then finally, sleep.

It is easy in retrospect to see why he'd want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long period of time a hair shirt woven out of her own hair.

In the past, we'd talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world.

We are as tired of each other's company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience... I know that this depression will increase.

My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off of it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails later at the hospital.

But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn't dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

If you think you are lost: beware bending the map. Don't say maybe it was a pond, not a lake; maybe the stream flowed east, not west. Leave a trail as you go. Try to mark trees.

The best thing with crazy people, Grandma Win used to say – the only thing, really – is to be somewhere else.

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs.

In America, the participating partner is likely to spend an average of 1,000 hours processing the incident with the hurt partner. This cannot be rushed.

What Keats said: No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.

How is that even possible?" the philosopher says. "He's one of the kindest people I've ever met." She knows. She knows. So it begs the question, doesn't it? Did she unkind and ungood and untrue him?

All she wants now is to go somewhere quiet and dark, she says.

You're a truth bomb, a cute guy said to her once at a party. Before excusing himself to go flirt with someone else.

But the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine.

You think that the mental anguish you are experiencing is a permanent condition, but for the vast majority of people it is only a temporary state. (But what if I'm special? What if I'm in the minority?)

Aquel chico era tan guapo que lo miraba mientras dormía. Si tuviera que resumir lo que hizo conmigo, diría lo siguiente: hizo que yo me pusiera a cantar todas la canciones malas que sonaban en la radio. Mientras me quiso y cuando dejó de hacerlo.

He keeps touching my arm, this guy. Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandanna on a stick.

The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wished to exist. This light could be found trapped inside man and animals and plants, and the Manichean mission was to try to release it. Because of this, they abstained from sex, viewing babies as fresh prisons of entrapped light.

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, the other wives think. Never.

The husband sets up their old telescope. There is almost no light pollution here. The wife looks up at the sky. There are more stars than anyone could ever need.

A woman in her forties was told by her doctor that she had to improve her health. The doctor suggested that she take up jogging and run two miles every day. He told her to call him in two weeks and tell him how she felt. Two weeks later, the woman checked in. "So how are you doing?" the doctor asked. "I feel pretty good," the woman said, "but I'm twenty-eight miles from home.