Jenny Offill - Dept. of Speculation (2014)

10 Sourced Quotes

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Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.

Jenny Offill
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
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
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
For years, I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.

Jenny Offill
When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

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

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
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