Top 140 Jenny Offill Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer.”

— Jenny Offill

102. “Also because I’m always saying he could quit his job if he wanted and we’ll go somewhere cheap and live on rice and beans with our kid. My husband doesn’t believe me about that last bit. And why should he? Once I spent $13 on a piece of cheese.”

— Jenny Offill

103. “Something in her past that makes her want to tear things to shreds.”

— Jenny Offill

104. “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

105. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

106. “I’m starting to miss him. The warm hum of his body next to me in bed. Certain little jokes and kindnesses. A kind of credit or goodwill, extended and extended again and again whether or not you deserve it.”

— Jenny Offill

107. “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

108. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

109. “He asks me what my favored platforms are. I explain that I don’t use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever. Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty!”

— Jenny Offill

110. “My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay, it’s there in the air somehow. The whole thing is more physical than mental, he tells me. Like hackles? The way a dog’s hackles go up? Yes, he says.”

— Jenny Offill

111. “Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business. 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

112. “Dizzying, this happiness.”

— Jenny Offill

113. “One day in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings the husband announces that he would like to try a separation. The wife is stunned. He has said nothing to her until now. But the shrink discourages it. “You might as well just get divorced,” she says.”

— Jenny Offill

114. “I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.”

— Jenny Offill

115. “Roses are red, Violets are blue, I feel slightly less dread, When I am with you.”

— Jenny Offill

116. “I tell Eli I will take him out to eat at the diner. NO ANIMALS ALLOWED, the sign outside the restaurant reads. “But we are animals, right?” “Don’t be a stickler,” I tell him.”

— Jenny Offill

117. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

118. “He tells me that smart houses are coming, that soon everything in our lives will be hooked up to the internet of things, blah, blah, blah, and we will be connected through social media to every other person in the world. He asks me what my favored platforms are. I explain that I don’t use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever. Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty!”

— Jenny Offill

119. “I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.”

— Jenny Offill

120. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

121. “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

122. “They say when you’re lonely you start to lose words.”

— Jenny Offill

123. “When my father saw my bloody elbows and knees, he tried to talk me out of flying. “People aren’t cut out for it,” he explained. “Our bodies are designed all wrong.” I didn’t believe him. He was the one who had told me about bumblebees, how their wings were too flimsy to support their fat bodies; yet, in the summer, they were everywhere, buzzing impossibly by.”

— Jenny Offill

124. “All she wants now is to go somewhere quiet and dark, she says.”

— Jenny Offill

125. “The most charismatic people – the poets, the mystics, the explorers – were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.”

— Jenny Offill

126. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

127. “In America, the participating partner is likely to spend an average of 1,000 hours processing the incident with the hurt partner. This cannot be rushed.”

— Jenny Offill

128. “Do you know why I love you?” my daughter asks me. She is floating in the bathwater, her head lathered white. “Why” I say. “Because I am your mother,” she tells me.”

— Jenny Offill

129. “You’re a truth bomb, a cute guy said to her once at a party. Before excusing himself to go flirt with someone else.”

— Jenny Offill

130. “Because all in is terrifying. With all in, you lose everything.”

— Jenny Offill

131. “Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I’d say.”

— Jenny Offill

132. “We’re married, remember? Nobody’s breaking up with anybody.”

— Jenny Offill

133. “But she does get irritated when her college sends around the memo at the end of the semester about how to recognize a suicidal student. She wants to send it back marked up in black letters. How about you look in their eyes?”

— Jenny Offill

134. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

135. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

136. “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.”

— Jenny Offill

137. “Lia called her right before the lights went out. There’s that moment, you know, for most people, where you decide you want to wake up in the world one more day.”

— Jenny Offill

138. “But for now my daughter and I stand shivering in front of the meat case. “I’m cold,” she says. “Why can’t we go? Why do we have to stand here?” There is some kind of meat I am supposed to buy. A kind of meat to go in a meat recipe. “We can go soon,” I say. “Just wait. Let me think for a minute. You’re not letting me think.”

— Jenny Offill

139. “The husband sets up their old telescope. There is almost no light pollution here. The wife looks up at the sky. There are more stars than anyone could ever need.”

— Jenny Offill

140. “We had told people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn’t have to speak.”

— Jenny Offill

141. “A few days later the baby sees the garden hose come on and we hear her laughing. All my life now appears to be one happy moment. This is what the first man in space said. Later, when it’s time to go to bed, she puts both legs in one side of her footy pajamas and slyly waits for us to notice.”

— Jenny Offill