Quotes by Jenny Offill - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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To live in a city is to be forever flinching.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Cities
Forever
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These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Bits
Burrs
Sticks
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I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
People
Two
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The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Fun
Like Love
Love Is
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My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Art
Married
Monsters
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The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Home
People
Reason
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What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Awake
Capture
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When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Father
Mother
Said
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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 / Novelist
Ambition
Coats
Looks
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You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Blue
Thinking
Tunnels
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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 / Novelist
Kind
Notes
Years
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Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Birth
Self
Years
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I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Quiet
Self Contained
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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 / Novelist
Courtesy
Imagine
Tired
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I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Fiction Writer
Inhabit
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I can be bolder on the page, as a character. I can gnash my teeth, I can scream and yell, in a way that I'm perhaps too timid to do in real life.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Real Life
Scream
Teeth
Life Character Way
Bolder
Page
Timid
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One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, Right. Now I understand how this is done.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Done
Mastery
Odd Things
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One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Certainty
Mastery
Odd
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Always the danger for me in life and in art is not to be brave. I am not a naturally brave person. I have to will myself not to hole up in my house and read my life away.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Be Brave
Danger
Life Art Myself
Naturally
Hole
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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 / Novelist
Baby
Lying
Sleep
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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 / Novelist
Buddhist
Moving
Suffering
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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 / Novelist
Fewer
Fun
Getting Older
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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 / Novelist
Daughter
Morning
Sleep
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I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Philosophical
Streak
Cross
Distilled
Domestic
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I like to write from midnight to dawn with great stores of candy and Red Bull laid in... I'm not sure why I have the work habits of a 20-year-old coder, but no matter how many times I set up a more reasonable schedule, I always fall back to this.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Candy
Dawn
Midnight
Reasonable
Red Bull
Stores
Work Great Always
Bull
Habits
How Many Times
Laid
Schedule
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Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Flip
Outdated
Roulette
Collect
Momentous
Operation
Quotes
Reference
Strike
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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 / Novelist
Art
Married
Monsters
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I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Cards
Classic
Linear
Catch
Certain Point
Note
Seemed
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I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling.
Jenny Offill / Novelist
Clarity
Extreme
Center
Convention
Emotional Experiences
Lens
Opposed
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