Jenny Offill Famous Quotes
Reading Jenny Offill quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Jenny Offill. Righ click to see or save pictures of Jenny Offill quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
I met an Australian who said he loved to travel alone. He talked about his job as we drank by the sea. When a student gets it, when it first breaks across his face, it's so fucking beautiful, he told me. I nodded, moved, though I'd never taught anyone a single thing. What do you teach, I asked him. Rollerblading, he explained.
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. Later,
Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.
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.
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 own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.
Sometimes she plays a game now where she scatters her stuffed animals all over the living room. "Babies, babies," she mutters darkly as she covers them with white napkins. "Civil War Battlefield," we call it.
The best thing with crazy people, Grandma Win used to say – the only thing, really – is to be somewhere else.
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.
There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.
The wife sits in the backyard with binoculars. She is trying to learn about the birds. She has seen robins and sparrows and wrens. A green-throated hummingbird. She wants to know the name of the black bird with the red wings. She looks it up. It is a red-winged blackbird.
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.
But lately I'm like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let's be pure of heart again!
But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.
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.
But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.
Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.
He had a melodious voice. I wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious resistance.
Why can you hear the ocean inside a seashell? This is just a trick your ears play on you. What you hear is not the sound of the ocean, but rather the sound of your own blood rushing through your ears. All the shell does is amplify the sound so that you can hear it, the way a stethoscope lets you hear the beating of your heart. Some people say you hear the sea inside a shell because the shell remembers its home even when it has been taken away, but this is just a story.
And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.
The thing is this: Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him. "It was a fucking miracle that I found him," she tells the philosopher.
Out of dark waters, this.
Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.
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.
The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on.
I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.
She told me that at the end of death there was a long tunnel and in it awaited everyone you ever loved. But if you never loved anyone there was just an empty room.
When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.
There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.
The adultery book says to say affirmations of some sort each day, about yourself or your marriage. The wife doesn't like the ones that are suggested so she makes up her own.
Nerves of Steel
No favors for fuckers
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.
And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.
Get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I've jotted down a few of them. Objects create happiness. The animals are pleased to be of use. Your cities will shine forever. Death will not touch you.
Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn't look at it.
Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. "Seconds!" I say, but he is unmoved. "People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us," he claims.
When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.
Hahaha!
(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)
The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.
She has never liked me because I don't have a proper degree. Feral librarians, they call us, as in just wandered out of the woods.
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.
We're married, remember? Nobody's breaking up with anybody.
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.
What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.
This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won't just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.
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.
Life equals structure plus activity.
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.
There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.
What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.
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.
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.
Advice for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart ... it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.
The wife has begun planning a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped writing on a grocery list 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.
I can be bolder on the page, as a character. I can gnash my teeth, I can scream and yell, in a way that I'm perhaps too timid to do in real life.
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.
For years, I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.
Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart.
I read an article written by a woman living alone who got them. She talks about how depressing it is to have no one to help her with all the spraying and washing and cooking and bagging. She's spent all her money, hasn't had a date in years. I show it to my husband. "It's true. We're lucky," he says.
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.
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.
She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it.
Survival in space is a challenging endeavor. As the history of modern warfare suggests, people have generally proven themselves unable to live and work together peacefully over long periods of time. Especially in isolated or stressful situations, those living in close quarters often erupt into hostility.
One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'
A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.
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.
Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.
Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live.
You know what's punk rock about marriage? Nothing. You know what's punk rock about marriage? All the puke and shit and piss.
What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.
But the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine.
That night on TV, I saw the tattoo I wished my life had warranted. If you have not known suffering, love me. A Russian murderer beat me to it.
In those last weeks, we drove without talking, trying to outride the heat, each alone in the dream the city had become. I was afraid to speak, to touch his arm even.
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.
Found a book called Thriving Not Surviving in a box on the street. I stood there, flipping through it, unwilling to commit.
Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy. Darwin
We had told people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn't have to speak.
The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck,
Where did all the words go?" I asked.
"They just wasted away," my mom explained, " like a leg you never walk on.
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.
Are animals lonely? Other animals, I mean.
My husband gets a new job.... The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. "Not bad," he says with a shrug. "Only vaguely soul-crushing.
I like to write from midnight to dawn with great stores of candy and Red Bull laid in ... I'm not sure why I have the work habits of a 20-year-old coder, but no matter how many times I set up a more reasonable schedule, I always fall back to this.
Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.
The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)
Clothes are the only thing that separates us from animals," my mother said. "Clothes and a sense of shame.
We used to call her Little, Little come here, we'd say. Little, unhand the cat, but then one day she won't let us, "I am big," she says and her face is stormy.
If only I'd remembered that old proverb: When three people say you are drunk, go to sleep.
Always the danger for me in life and in art is not to be brave. I am not a naturally brave person. I have to will myself not to hole up in my house and read my life away.
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.
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 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.
In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.
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.
Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends.
If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds.
I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling.
There is a man who travels around the world trying to find places where you can stand still and hear no human sound.
Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on the slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die.
You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.
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? The husband doesn't have even a touch of this raised-by-wolvesness.