172 Quotes by Jenny Offill

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If only I’d remembered that old proverb: When three people say you are drunk, go to sleep.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

My mother told me once that each thing, each being, has two names. One is the name by which it is known in this world and the other is a secret name that it keeps hidden. But if you call it by this name it cannot help but respond. This is the name by which the creature was known in the Garden of Eden.