Top 140 Jenny Offill Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.”

— Jenny Offill

4. “There is a man who travels around the world trying to find places where you can stand still and hear no human sound. 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.”

— Jenny Offill

5. “The Buddhists say that wisdom may be attained by reaching the three marks. The first is an understanding of the absence of self. The second is an understanding of the impermanence of all things. The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience.”

— Jenny Offill

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

— Jenny Offill

7. “The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.”

— Jenny Offill

8. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

11. “Clothes are the only thing that separates us from animals,” my mother said. “Clothes and a sense of shame.”

— Jenny Offill

12. “If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.”

— Jenny Offill

13. “A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person. He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.”

— Jenny Offill

14. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

15. “What Keats said: No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.”

— Jenny Offill

16. “An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country. A Japanese proverb: Even an insect one-tenth of an inch long has five-tenths of a soul.”

— Jenny Offill

17. “Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.”

— Jenny Offill

18. “I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.”

— Jenny Offill

19. “Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.”

— Jenny Offill

20. “There is a picture of my mother holding me as a baby, a look of naked love on her face. For years, it embarrassed me. Now there is a picture of me with my daughter looking exactly the same way.”

— Jenny Offill

21. “How had she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. 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.”

— Jenny Offill

22. “Both have trouble working up the nerve to go into the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings.”

— Jenny Offill

23. “Much of the population was in a mild stupor, depressed, congregating in small unstable groups, and prone to rumors of doom. But I don’t know. That’s pretty much every day here.”

— Jenny Offill

24. “When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.”

— Jenny Offill

25. “You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.”

— Jenny Offill

26. “These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.”

— Jenny Offill

27. “What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.”

— Jenny Offill

28. “It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth.”

— Jenny Offill

29. “In the first class I ever took with Sylvia, she told us about assortative mating. Meaning like with like – depressive with depressive. The problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. Like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. The question being: Is this really the room you want to spend your life in?”

— Jenny Offill

30. “The wife reads about something called “the wayward fog” on the Internet. The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly.”

— Jenny Offill

31. “Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.”

— Jenny Offill

32. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

33. “The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck.”

— Jenny Offill

34. “Life equals structure plus activity.”

— Jenny Offill

35. “But the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine.”

— Jenny Offill

36. “There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.”

— Jenny Offill

37. “There are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting season. “At least most people who hunt up here hunt for food, not sport,” she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her dirt road. “Why don’t they farm deer?” I wonder. “Is it because they are too pretty?” She shakes her head. “It’s because they panic when penned.”

— Jenny Offill

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

— Jenny Offill

39. “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

40. “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

41. “They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.”

— Jenny Offill

42. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

43. “She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.”

— Jenny Offill

44. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

45. “I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.”

— Jenny Offill

46. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

47. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

48. “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

49. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

50. “What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.”

— Jenny Offill