“But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“If I had to sum up what he did to me, I’d say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. Both when he loved me and when he didn't.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to take yourself more seriously.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“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 own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“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.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“Advice for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart … it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“How had she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, But aren’t you afraid you’re going to get lonely? Get?”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“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.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“Her neighbor’s husband fell in love with a girl who served coffee to him every morning. She was twenty-three and wanted to be a dancer or a poet or a physical therapist. When he left his family, his wife said, “Does it matter to you how foolish you look? That all our friends find you ridiculous?” He stood in the doorway, his coat in his hand. “No,” he said. The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“My husband gets a new job.... The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. "Not bad," he says with a shrug. "Only vaguely soul-crushing.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill
Born place: Massachusetts, The United States
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“Has that line ever worked for anyone?”
“I’m not feeding you lines. I mean every word.”
…
“Day One of my life was the day I met you.”
“Okay, that’s a winner. You can put it in.”
― Sylvia Day, quote from Entwined with You
“Everything about [chance] scares the bejesus out of so many people; it's the this thing they try to avoid at all costs. Don't travel to the Middle East these days - there's a chance something could happen. Don't get involved with that new fellow on Creamery Street - I hear a lot of mud was scraped off his floor after the divorce. Don't have your baby at home - there's a a chance something could go wrong. Don't don't don't... Well, you can't live your life like that! You can't spend your entire life avoiding chance. It's out there, it's inescapable, it's a part of the soul of the world. There are no sure things in this universe, and it's absolutely ridiculous to try and live like there are!”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from Midwives
“I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
“This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
The Dangerous Lives...
Mistakes Were Made (...
The Goal: A Process...
On the Other Side
A Long Way Gone
The Girl In BetweenBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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