Jenny Offill

“Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around…

— Jenny Offill

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our…

— Jenny Offill

“Everything that has eyes will cease to see,”

— Jenny Offill

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead,

— Jenny Offill

“Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.”

— Jenny Offill

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.

— Jenny Offill

I like to write from midnight to dawn with great stores of candy and Red Bull laid in... I'm not sure why…

— Jenny Offill

“Survival in space is a challenging endeavor. As the history of modern warfare suggests, people have generally proven themselves unable to live…

— Jenny Offill

These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.

— Jenny Offill

“Dizzying, this happiness.”

— Jenny Offill

I can be bolder on the page, as a character. I can gnash my teeth, I can scream and yell, in a…

— Jenny Offill

To live in a city is to be forever flinching,

— Jenny Offill

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.

— Jenny Offill

I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.

— Jenny Offill

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits…

— Jenny Offill

“If I had to sum up what he did to me, I’d say it was this: he made me sing along to…

— Jenny Offill

I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

— Jenny Offill

“The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wished…

— Jenny Offill

“My husband gets a new job.... The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. "Not bad," he says…

— Jenny Offill

“Where did all the words go?" I asked. "They just wasted away," my mom explained, " like a leg you never walk on.”

— Jenny Offill

Always the danger for me in life and in art is not to be brave. I am not a naturally brave person.…

— Jenny Offill

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun…

— Jenny Offill

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell…

— Jenny Offill

“But lately I'm like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let's be pure of heart again!”

— Jenny Offill

You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the…

— Jenny Offill