Quotes from Jenny Offill

My love for her seemed doomed, hopelessly unrequited. There should be songs for this, I thought, but if there were I didn't know them.

It is important to be on the alert for "the decisive moment," says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.

My husband gets a new job, scoring soundtracks for commercials. The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. "Not bad," he says with a shrug. "Only vaguely soul-crushing.

A boy stepping into the street and opening an umbrella for a girl keeping dry in the doorway.

Don't use antibacterial soap! Catherine told me, because lalalalalalalala.

Survival instructors have a saying: get organized or die.

If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds.

Worms appeared on Earth more than six hundred million years ago. They were soft, small-bodied creatures that fed on nutrients at the bottom of the sea. But they were different from anything that had come before because they had heads with mouths and primitive brains. Also new were there guts and organs, arteries and veins. Today there are so many worms in the world that even if every other substance were to disappear from Earth the shape of our planet would still be outlined by them.

Before I was born, they had traveled around the world together, and sometimes it seemed that they went away again and forgot me.

We don't serve time travelers here. A time traveler walks into the bar.

Birds are colder than animals that live on the earth, because they are not conceived in such intense and heated desire. Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere.

Once my mother had asked me, "Is it better to burn to death or freeze to death?" and the right answer was freeze because at the very end there was a trick that made you think you were warm.

Studies have shown that 94% of college professors think that they do above average work.

But she is tired all the time now. She can feel how slowly she is walking, as if the air itself is something to be reckoned with.

Mark Twain fell in love with his wife after he saw her picture painted on an ivory miniature the size of a fingernail.

The car makes a clicking sound as it moves across the wooden slats. Then there is nothing beneath us and we fall. The windows fill with water, mud, leaves. The car floats.

There are bills and supermarket flyers. Also a magazine addressed to a former tenant. The cover promises tips for helping depressive people. What to say: I'm sorry that you're in so much pain. I am not going to leave you. I am going to take care of myself, so you don't need to worry that your pain might hurt me.

Scientists say that the theory of everything is a technical expression, not a metaphysical one.

The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck...

A man is having terrible dreams. In them, he is being chased by a demon. He seeks counsel from a therapist, who tells him he must turn around and confront the demon or he will never escape it. He vows to do this, but each night in his dreams, he runs again. Finally, he manages to turn around and look straight at the demon. "Why are you chasing me?" he asks it. The demon says, "I don't know. It's your dream.

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering.

Everything that has eyes will cease to see

My brother told me once that he missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him.

There was once a race of mythic arctic dwellers called the Hyperboreans. Their weather was mild, their trees bore fruit all year, and no one was ever sick. But after a thousand years, they grew bored of this life. They decked themselves in garlands and leaped off the cliffs into the sea.