"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
"There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, the other wiv..."
"Someone had given my daughter a doctor's kit. Carefully, she takes her own temperature, places the pressure cuff around her arm. Then she takes the cuff off and examines it. "Would you like to be a do..."
"My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off of it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails later a..."
"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 ..."
"The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon."
"I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves "comfortable" when what they mean is decadently r..."
"A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things."
"Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it."
"Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad."