Quotes from Jenny Offill

Because all in is terrifying. With all in, you lose everything

He asks me what my favored platforms are. I explain that I don't use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can't stop pushing a lever. Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty!

Roses are red, Violets are blue, I feel slightly less dread, When I am with you.

I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

But she does get irritated when her college sends around the memo at the end of the semester about how to recognize a suicidal student. She wants to send it back marked up in black letters. How about you look in their eyes?

What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.

He's not doing well with this sleep deprivation. There's a reason it's used as a tool of torture. But still, everyone I know is trying to sleep less. Insomnia as a badge of honor. Proof that you are paying attention.

Three questions from my daughter: Why is there salt in the sea? Will you die before me? Do you know how many dogs George Washington had? Don't know. Yes. Please. 36.

She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea. But only possibly.

The most charismatic people—the poets, the mystics, the explorers—were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.

I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

Lia called her right before the lights went out. There's that moment, you know, for most people, where you decide you want to wake up in the world one more day.

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

Two Jokes 1. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save? His wife. (Because his mistress will always understand.) 2. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save? His mistress. (Because his wife will never understand.)

I tell Eli I will take him out to eat at the diner. NO ANIMALS ALLOWED, the sign outside the restaurant reads. "But we are animals, right?" "Don't be a stickler," I tell him.

A few days later the baby sees the garden hose come on and we hear her laughing. All my life now appears to be one happy moment. This is what the first man in space said. Later, when it's time to go to bed, she puts both legs in one side of her footy pajamas and slyly waits for us to notice.

Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart.

We're married, remember? Nobody's breaking up with anybody.

Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.

A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me. Sometimes you went your whole life without knowing you had one and then suddenly it appeared. In Africa, the soul has the same shape as the body but cannot be seen. At night, it travels through the world while a person dreams. But it returns to the body the moment a sleeping person is touched.

A sparrow's heart beats four hundred and sixty times a minute. A man's, just seventy-eight. But sometimes, at night, my heart approached sparrow speed. This happened when the darkness crept into my bed and wrapped itself around my feet.

When my father saw my bloody elbows and knees, he tried to talk me out of flying. "People aren't cut out for it," he explained. "Our bodies are designed all wrong." I didn't believe him. He was the one who had told me about bumblebees, how their wings were too flimsy to support their fat bodies; yet, in the summer, they were everywhere, buzzing impossibly by.

We had told people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn't have to speak.

They say when you're lonely you start to lose words.