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Jenny Offill QUOTES

Jenny Offill QUOTES

1 " A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

2 " 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. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

3 " 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. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

4 " 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. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

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

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

6 " A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

7 " 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. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

8 " Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

9 " 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. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

10 " Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

11 " What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

12 " The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.) "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

13 " The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

14 " What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances,” she says. She pulls up a slide of people having a picnic by a lake. Blue skies, green trees, white people.

“Suppose you go with some friends to the park to have a picnic. This act is, of course, morally neutral, but if you witness a group of children drowning in the lake and you continue to eat and chat, you have become monstrous. "

― Jenny Offill , Weather

15 " 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, all the other wives think. Never.

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 with chewing gum and wire and string. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

16 " 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. "

― Jenny Offill , Weather

17 " 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. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

18 " 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?) "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation

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

― Jenny Offill , Weather

20 " 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. "

― Jenny Offill , Dept. of Speculation