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by Jenny Offill

Meaning like with like—depressive with depressive. The problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. Like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. The question being: Is this really the room you want to spend your life in?

My mother calls and speaks to me of the light, the vine, the living bread.

“What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances,”

Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?

“These people long for immortality but can’t wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee,” she says.

When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.

Once sadness was considered one of the deadly sins, but this was later changed to sloth. (Two strikes then.)

Certain little jokes and kindnesses. A kind of credit or goodwill, extended and extended again and again whether or not you deserve it.

on marriage

there is a lottery system to see who gets to have their pain taken away. America is the name of this place where you can win big.

The thought of having to be with someone else long enough to deserve it again. That’s what feels impossible. Because the part where they are charmed by you, where you are every good thing, and then the part later—sooner, maybe, but always later—where they tire of you, of all your repetitions, of all your little and big shames, I don’t think I could bear that.