172 Quotes by Jenny Offill

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?