172 Quotes by Jenny Offill

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.

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.

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.

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.

For fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she’d suspend her fierce judgment of the world and fall silent there. And when she did, a tiny space would clear in my head and I could think again.

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.

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

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.

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.