Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill
Jenny Offillis an American novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
daughter morning sleep
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.
home people reason
The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.
cities forever
To live in a city is to be forever flinching,
art monsters married
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead,
sticks burrs bits
These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.
two people
I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.
art monsters married
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.
mastery done odd-things
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.
fun getting-older seems
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.
baby lying sleep
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.
bit center extreme gives lens opposed
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.
mother father said
When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.
art danger hole house life naturally
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.
thinking tunnels blue
You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.