Last Things Quotes

“Where did all the words go?" I asked.
"They just wasted away," my mom explained, " like a leg you never walk on.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“«Una volta» disse mia madre «non esisteva il buio totale. Persino di notte, la luna era luminosa quanto il sole. L’unica differenza stava nella luce, che era blu. Vedevi tutto per chilometri e chilometri e non faceva mai freddo. Si chiamava crepuscolo».
«Perché crepuscolo?».
«Perché è una parola in codice per cielo blu». Mi ero ricordata che si diceva codice blu quando moriva qualcuno, e anche questo aveva a che fare con il cielo.
Un giorno Dio aveva chiamato il pipistrello per dargli una cesta da portare sulla Luna. La cesta era piena di buio, ma Dio non aveva detto al pipistrello cos’era, solo “Portala sulla luna, poi quando torni ti spiego tutto”. Così il pipistrello parte in cerca della luna con la cesta in groppa. Mentre vola verso il cielo, la luna lo vede e si nasconde dietro una nuvola. Il pipistrello è stanco, e si ferma a riposare. Depone la cesta e va in cerca di qualcosa da mangiare. Mentre è a caccia, arrivano altri animali (più che altro lupi e cani, e anche un tasso con una zampa rotta). Pensando che nella cesta ci sia del cibo, gli animali alzano il coperchio, ma dentro c’è solo il buio, e loro non l’hanno mai visto. I cani e i lupi cercano di tirarlo fuori e di giocarci, ma gli guizza tra i denti e scivola via. In quel momento torna il pipistrello, apre la cesta e la trova vuota. Gli altri animali spariscono nella notte e il pipistrello si alza in volo per andare a riprendere il buio. Lo vede dappertutto, ma non riesce proprio a infilarlo di nuovo nella cesta. Per questo il pipistrello ancora oggi dorme tutto il giorno e vola di notte. Cerca sempre di riprendere il buio.”
― Jenny Offill, Le cose che restano

“She told me that at the end of death there was a long tunnel and in it awaited everyone you ever loved. But if you never loved anyone there was just an empty room.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Why can you hear the ocean inside a seashell? This is just a trick your ears play on you. What you hear is not the sound of the ocean, but rather the sound of your own blood rushing through your ears. All the shell does is amplify the sound so that you can hear it, the way a stethoscope lets you hear the beating of your heart. Some people say you hear the sea inside a shell because the shell remembers its home even when it has been taken away, but this is just a story.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“A sparrow’s heart beats four hundred and sixty times a minute. A man’s, just seventy-eight. But sometimes, at night, my heart approached sparrow speed. This happened when the darkness crept into my bed and wrapped itself around my feet.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Clothes are the only thing that separates us from animals,” my mother said. “Clothes and a sense of shame.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“When my father saw my bloody elbows and knees, he tried to talk me out of flying. “People aren’t cut out for it,” he explained. “Our bodies are designed all wrong.” I didn’t believe him. He was the one who had told me about bumblebees, how their wings were too flimsy to support their fat bodies; yet, in the summer, they were everywhere, buzzing impossibly by.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me. Sometimes you went your whole life without knowing you had one and then suddenly it appeared. In Africa, the soul has the same shape as the body but cannot be seen. At night, it travels through the world while a person dreams. But it returns to the body the moment a sleeping person is touched.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“I tried to be fascinated, but mostly I was bored.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“St. Hildegard wrote: Birds are colder than animals that live on the earth, because they are not conceived in such intense and heated desire. Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Are you aware,” she said, “that at the end of his life Jean-Paul Sartre renounced existentialism and turned to pie?”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“One billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar. And then on the wall next to it: THE COSMIC CALENDAR Jan. 1: Big Bang May 1: Origin of the Milky Way Galaxy Sept. 9: Origin of the Solar System Sept. 14: Formation of the Earth Sept. 25: Origin of life on Earth Oct. 2: Formation of the oldest rocks known on Earth Oct. 9: Date of the oldest fossils known to man Nov. 1: Invention of sex (by microorganisms) Dec. 16: First worms Dec. 19: First fish Dec. 21: First insects Dec. 22: First amphibians Dec. 24: First dinosaurs Dec. 26: First mammals Dec. 27: First birds Dec. 29: First primates Dec. 30: First hominids Dec. 31: First humans On the blackboard, my mother had written: If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds. I copied this into my green notebook. My mother wiped the chalk off on her skirt. “I just thought you should know,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you did.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“The Story of Stupidity. When I asked him what it was about, he told me it was an autobiography. “Whose autobiography?” I asked. “Oh, never mind,” he said.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“In her office, there was a picture of her, knee deep in water, dressed as a giant crane. The summer before, she had gone to Texas and worked for a program that bred captive whooping cranes. All the workers dressed as birds so that the cranes would know how to feed their own babies when they were set free. My mother took the costume with her when she left and sometimes she put on the feathered head and talked through the beak to me.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“The band began to play faster, then faster still. My mother came over and took his hand. Dance with me, she said, and my father did. Later, at the hotel, when she took off his shoes, she was surprised to find them filled with blood.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on their slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“The book he was reading was called Being and Nothingness. The only question he’d answered all night long was which was better. (Nothingness.)”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“My mother said most cryptozoologists were really just hunters in disguise, but that there were some, a very few, who worked like secret agents in the wild. These were the ones who found lost animals and helped them hide.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“The word for such a thing is ‘uncanny,’ ” she told me, and this meant that it was both familiar and strange at the same time, like the moon.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“The car makes a clicking sound as it moves across the wooden slats. Then there is nothing beneath us and we fall. The windows fill with water, mud, leaves. The car floats.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Before I was born, they had traveled around the world together, and sometimes it seemed that they went away again and forgot me.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Mark Twain fell in love with his wife after he saw her picture painted on an ivory miniature the size of a fingernail.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Once my mother had asked me, “Is it better to burn to death or freeze to death?” and the right answer was freeze because at the very end there was a trick that made you think you were warm.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Birds are colder than animals that live on the earth, because they are not conceived in such intense and heated desire. Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“That night, she told me the old story again about the woman who had been left behind on a desert island by the man she loved. She waited for him to return for many years, surviving on seaweed and sand, until at last she grew so small she could fit herself inside a bottle and roll into the sea. Who found the bottle, I wondered, but my mother said no one knew what happened to it or where the woman had wanted to go. A fish could have swallowed the bottle, she said, or it could have been dashed against rocks. Other possibilities: sharks, mermaids, lonely sailors at sea.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Worms appeared on Earth more than six hundred million years ago. They were soft, small-bodied creatures that fed on nutrients at the bottom of the sea. But they were different from anything that had come before because they had heads with mouths and primitive brains. Also new were there guts and organs, arteries and veins. Today there are so many worms in the world that even if every other substance were to disappear from Earth the shape of our planet would still be outlined by them.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things

“Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on the slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die.”
― Jenny Offill, Last Things