Top 35 Jenny Odell Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”

— Jenny Odell

2. “Realities are, after all, inhabitable. If we can render a new reality together – with attention – perhaps we can meet each other there.”

— Jenny Odell

3. “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”

— Jenny Odell

4. “I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.”

— Jenny Odell

5. “Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.”

— Jenny Odell

6. “However you refer to it, what this practice has in common with Deep Listening is that observing birds requires you quite literally to do nothing. Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.”

— Jenny Odell

7. “In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.”

— Jenny Odell

8. “What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return-and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.”

— Jenny Odell

9. “Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation.”

— Jenny Odell

10. “Given that all of the issues that face us demand and understanding of complexity, interrelationship, and nuance, the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill.”

— Jenny Odell

11. “To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world – contemptus mundi – but the channels through which you encounter it day to day.”

— Jenny Odell

12. “Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding – seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions – and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.”

— Jenny Odell

13. “The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.”

— Jenny Odell

14. “To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.”

— Jenny Odell

15. “In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.”

— Jenny Odell

16. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown,” they wrote, adding solemnly, “The potential of nothing is everything.”4.”

— Jenny Odell

17. “Extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed – never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.”

— Jenny Odell

18. “What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?”

— Jenny Odell

19. “After all, it is public opinion that social media exploits, and public opinion that has no patience for ambiguity, context, or breaks with tradition. Public opinion is not looking to change or to be challenged; it is what wants a band to keep making songs exactly like the hit they once had.”

— Jenny Odell

20. “Reality is blobby. It refuses to be systematized.”

— Jenny Odell

21. “Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”

— Jenny Odell

22. “Given how poorly art survives in a system that only values the bottom line, the stakes are cultural as well. What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest-destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.”

— Jenny Odell

23. “That’s why, when I worry about the estuary’s diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity – about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.”

— Jenny Odell

24. “Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information – provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it’s even about – are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment. Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it’s me who’s being researched.”

— Jenny Odell

25. “It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world – contemptus mundi – but the channels through which you encounter it day to day.”

— Jenny Odell

26. “Maybe this is the beginning of how my own prejudice ends. Watching for it. Catching it and holding it up to the light. Releasing it. Watching for it again.21.”

— Jenny Odell

27. “Let’s not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors.”

— Jenny Odell

28. “I’m realizing that these are my ways of insisting on something. Living between the mountains and this hyper accelerated, entrepreneurial culture, I can’t help but ask the question: What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?”

— Jenny Odell

29. “In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation.”

— Jenny Odell

30. “Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.”

— Jenny Odell

31. “The second tool that doing nothing offers us is a sharpened ability to listen. I’ve already mentioned Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in the broader sense of understanding one another. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”

— Jenny Odell

32. “To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”

— Jenny Odell

33. “Maybe “the point” isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment – a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.”

— Jenny Odell

34. “Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.”

— Jenny Odell

35. “In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”

— Jenny Odell

36. “Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.”

— Jenny Odell

37. “Simply as a gap in the known, doubt can be the emergency exit that leads somewhere else.”

— Jenny Odell

38. “Diogenes thought every “sane” person in the world was actually insane for heeding any of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption, and ignorance.”

— Jenny Odell