Top 140 Jenny Offill Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?”

— Jenny Offill

53. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

54. “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

55. “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

56. “If you think you are lost: beware bending the map. Don’t say maybe it was a pond, not a lake; maybe the stream flowed east, not west. Leave a trail as you go. Try to mark trees.”

— Jenny Offill

57. “Someone had given my daughter a doctor’s kit. Carefully, she takes her own temperature, places the pressure cuff around her arm. Then she takes the cuff off and examines it. “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

58. “Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.”

— Jenny Offill

59. “When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, But aren’t you afraid you’re going to get lonely? Get?”

— Jenny Offill

60. “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

61. “Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn’t look at it.”

— Jenny Offill

62. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

63. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

64. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

65. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

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

— Jenny Offill

67. “The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.”

— Jenny Offill

68. “The days with the baby felt long but there was nothing expansive about them. Caring for her required me to repeat a series of tasks that had the peculiar quality of seeming both urgent and tedious. They cut the day up into little scraps.”

— Jenny Offill

69. “I read a study once about sleep deprivation. The researchers made cat-sized islands of sand in the middle of a pool of water, then placed very tired cats on top of them. At first, the cats curled up perfectly on the sand and slept, but eventually they’d sprawl out and wake up in water. I can’t remember what they were trying to prove exactly. All I took away was that the cats went crazy.”

— Jenny Offill

70. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

71. “What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.”

— Jenny Offill

72. “Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. Little people, Edison called them. Entities.”

— Jenny Offill

73. “Buddhist practice includes the notion that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been each other’s mothers and fathers and children and siblings. Therefore, we should treat each person we encounter as if they are our beloved.”

— Jenny Offill

74. “Her neighbor’s husband fell in love with a girl who served coffee to him every morning. She was twenty-three and wanted to be a dancer or a poet or a physical therapist. When he left his family, his wife said, “Does it matter to you how foolish you look? That all our friends find you ridiculous?” He stood in the doorway, his coat in his hand. “No,” he said. The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.”

— Jenny Offill

75. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

76. “Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.”

— Jenny Offill

77. “Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live.”

— Jenny Offill

78. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

79. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

80. “Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.”

— Jenny Offill

81. “How is that even possible?” the philosopher says. “He’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.” She knows. She knows. So it begs the question, doesn’t it? Did she unkind and ungood and untrue him?”

— Jenny Offill

82. “Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. Little people, Edison called them. Entities. He had a theory about where they came from and that theory was outer space.”

— Jenny Offill

83. “He had a melodious voice. I wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious resistance.”

— Jenny Offill

84. “He’s not doing well with this sleep deprivation. There’s a reason it’s used as a tool of torture. But still, everyone I know is trying to sleep less. Insomnia as a badge of honor. Proof that you are paying attention.”

— Jenny Offill

85. “I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.”

— Jenny Offill

86. “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

87. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

88. “The best thing with crazy people, Grandma Win used to say – the only thing, really – is to be somewhere else.”

— Jenny Offill

89. “He keeps touching my arm, this guy. Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandanna on a stick.”

— Jenny Offill

90. “It is so easy now for the wife to be patient and kind to the daughter. She will never love anyone or anything more. Never. It is official.”

— Jenny Offill

91. “Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends.”

— Jenny Offill

92. “Sometimes at night I conduct interviews with myself. What do you want? I don’t know. What do you want? I don’t know. What seems to be the problem? Just leave me alone.”

— Jenny Offill

93. “These people long for immortality but can’t wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee,” she says.”

— Jenny Offill

94. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

95. “Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.”

— Jenny Offill

96. “In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.”

— Jenny Offill

97. “A woman in her forties was told by her doctor that she had to improve her health. The doctor suggested that she take up jogging and run two miles every day. He told her to call him in two weeks and tell him how she felt. Two weeks later, the woman checked in. “So how are you doing?” the doctor asked. “I feel pretty good,” the woman said, “but I’m twenty-eight miles from home.”

— Jenny Offill

98. “It is easy in retrospect to see why he’d want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long period of time a hair shirt woven out of her own hair.”

— Jenny Offill

99. “Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart.”

— Jenny Offill

100. “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.”

— Jenny Offill