Weather Quotes

“Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. “Seconds!” I say, but he is unmoved. “People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us,” he claims.

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.

Hahaha!

(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“The adjunct seems paler than usual. He isn't speaking in complete sentences. Would it be possible to...? Do you mind if...?

They say when you're lonely you start to lose words.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Funny how when you're married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you're anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person. He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances,” she says. She pulls up a slide of people having a picnic by a lake. Blue skies, green trees, white people.

“Suppose you go with some friends to the park to have a picnic. This act is, of course, morally neutral, but if you witness a group of children drowning in the lake and you continue to eat and chat, you have become monstrous.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“It is important to remember that emotional pain comes in waves. Remind yourself that there will be a pause in between waves.”
― jenny offill, Weather

“Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay, it’s there in the air somehow. The whole thing is more physical than mental, he tells me. Like hackles? The way a dog’s hackles go up? Yes, he says.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“I'm starting to miss him. The warm hum of his body next to me in bed. Certain little jokes and kindnesses. A kind of credit or goodwill, extended and extended again and again whether or not you deserve it.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“He had a melodious voice. I wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious resistance.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“How do you know all this?” “I'm a fucking librarian.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism?

A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on. "You can't outrun a bear," the other whispers. "I just have to outrun you," he says.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Henry and I make plans to meet for coffee at the place on his block. It is hard for him to get even that far away. “I’m on house arrest,” he whispers. “I’m jumping out of my skin.” I wish I could give him something for his nerves, but of course, I can’t. I remind myself (as I often do) never to become so addicted to drugs or alcohol that I’m not allowed to use them.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“In the first class I ever took with Sylvia, she told us about assortative mating. 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?”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“I offer her some birthday cake. She goes into the usual bit about temptation and sinfulness and maybe this and maybe that, and we have to go through every station of the fucking cross before she takes a bite of it.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“There are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting season. “At least most people who hunt up here hunt for food, not sport,” she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her dirt road. “Why don’t they farm deer?” I wonder. “Is it because they are too pretty?” She shakes her head. “It’s because they panic when penned.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Somehow, I get seated halfway down the table from her. I’m trapped next to this young techno-optimist guy. He explains that current technology will no longer seem strange when the generation who didn’t grow up with it finally ages out of the conversation. Dies, I think he means. His point is that eventually all those who are unnerved by what is falling away will be gone, and after that, there won’t be any more talk of what has been lost, only of what has been gained. But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn’t that mean if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can’t retrace our steps?”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Once sadness was considered one of the deadly sins, but this was later changed to sloth. (Two strikes then.)”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Buddhist practice includes the notion that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been each other's mothers and fathers and children and siblings. Therefore, we should treat each person we encounter as if they are our beloved.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“If only I’d remembered that old proverb: When three people say you are drunk, go to sleep.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“She has never liked me because I don’t have a proper degree. Feral librarians, they call us, as in just wandered out of the woods.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Much of the population was in a mild stupor, depressed, congregating in small unstable groups, and prone to rumors of doom. But I don’t know. That’s pretty much every day here.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Ben told me once that the Greeks had this term, epoché, meaning “I suspend judgment.” Useful for those of us prone to making common cause with strangers on buses. Sudden alliances, my brother calls them. I have to be careful. My heart is prodigal.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“He asks me what my favored platforms are. I explain that I don’t use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever. Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty!”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“These people long for immortality but can't wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee," she says.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn’t want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here. …”
― Jenny Offill, Weather