Quotes from Jenny Offill

What's keeping you here?" he says. Please, I think, but no, I can't even look at him. All these people. I have so many people, you wouldn't believe it.

Out of dark waters, this.

Some Jews saw walls being built around the ghetto and thought they still had time. Don't be fooled by everyone else's calm. Get out even when nobody is even considering it yet. When you look at 2060, southern Argentina might be a good place for your children since it's close to the Antarctic peninsula, the place where the survivor colonies will be built. …

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.

The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wish to exist. This light could be found trapped inside a 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.

What would it be like to make it so late into life before trouble hit? To always have someone on the front porch, calling you to dinner?

No set line between lost and not lost.

Aboard the Belgica, off Antarctica, May 20, 1898: Explorer Frederick Cook

Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation—a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: "My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

Caring is all we have, I think. Cynicism is just a soft form of denial.

Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandanna on a stick.

Maybe it's becoming just a hotel again. Not the place where she stood, then sat, then knelt, palms turned down on the bedspread. Dear God, Dear Monster, Dear God, Dear Monster, she prayed that night, shaking like a junkie until the slow sun rose again.

A desire for a small government is nothing new, of course. At the end of the nineteenth century, a U.S. government official proposed closing the office of patents. Everything of importance had already been invented, he said.

Ben told me that in Greek culture it has historically been considered both a duty and an honor to take care of strangers. You can see it with the villagers. The way they go out to rescue people in their boats or bring food to the exhausted ones on the beach. In ancient times, the gods used to test mortals by arriving on their doorsteps clothed in rags to see if they would be welcomed or turned away.

Buddhist practice includes the notion 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.

Il mio piano era non sposarmi mai. No, io volevo diventare un mostro d'arte. Le donne non diventano mai mostri d'arte, perché i veri mostri d'arte si preoccupano solo d'arte e mai di cose terrene. Nabokov non si chiudeva nemmeno l'ombrello, era Vera che gli leccava i francobolli.

Q: How did we end up here? A: We can, if need be, ransack the whole globe, penetrate into the bowels of the earth, descend to the bottom of the deep, travel to the farthest regions of this world, to acquire wealth, to increase our knowledge, or even only to please our eye and fancy. (William Derham, 1711)

I felt a sudden chill and pulled the blanket over my head. That's the way they bring horses out of a fire, I remembered. If they can't see, they won't panic. I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer.

Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to grow old. Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape old age. Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to get sick. Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape sickness. Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to die. Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape dying. Breathing in, I know that one day I will have to let go of everything and everyone I love. Breathing out, I know there is no way to bring them along.

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.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.

I dig out some change from my pocket. She takes a careful look at the nickels and dimes. God blesses me anyway.

What the Yoga People say: None of this is banal, if only you would attend to it.