172 Quotes by Jenny Offill

What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.

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

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

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.

It is important to remember that emotional pain comes in waves. Remind yourself that there will be a pause in between waves.

They say when you're lonely you start to lose words.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

It’s harder to get away in the summer. But still I go on a few trips with Sylvia. One thing that’s becoming clear on our travels: people are really sick of being lectured to about glaciers.“Listen, I’ve heard all about that,“ says this red-faced man. “But what’s going to happen to the American weather?

Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation—a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.