Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“Sometimes I feel dead," I told her, "and I hate everybody.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I hated my boyfriend but I liked the neighborhood.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“Once you leave a place like that, so long as it isn’t your hometown, you know you won’t ever have to see any of those people again.”
― Mary Miller, Always Happy Hour: Stories

“Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I didn’t like dogs. Not because they scared me—they didn’t—but because their deaths were so much harder to take than people’s.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“We were brand strategists and property lawyers and human resources specialists and personal finance consultants. We didn't know how to do anything so we Googled everything.”
― Ling Ma

“I laughed when she said “utilize” and she said “what?” and I said “just utilize, it’s a meaningless word” and then she tried to tell me that it “communicated” something different from the word “use” and the way she looked at me, chuckling, glancing over at James like “oh, how sweet, it tried to talk,” made me so mad that I might have said, maybe, something along the lines of “yeah, it communicates something, it’s a real first-gen-college-grad kind of word, like your parents are small-town conservative Christians who didn’t have any books in the house, and you’re self-conscious about your upbringing so you want to stand out by using elitist intellectual language, but you don’t actually know any long words, so you just truss up the word ‘use’ for no fucking reason other than to try to make people feel like you’re the one with the big mental dick, even though ‘utilize’ is basically just administrative jargon and completely déclassé to them that knows.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.”
― Douglas Coupland, JPod

“Adventure without risk is Disneyland.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“I was just thinking that you and I...have seen very different memes in our lives.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Why was the only choice paper or plastic, rathern than being able to choose to buy nothing at all?”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun

“There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“Everyday we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Things had gotten -- what's the word? Dry. Things had gotten sort of dry for me. I was working as a city janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summers, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the WIlliamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“If you’re lucky enough to find something you’re good at, where people appreciate you, don’t thumb your nose at it. If it’s an issue of salary or benefits, I’m open to discussing it.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art. Or whatever. To music, to poetry, to paintings and installations, to TV and the movies. But mostly TV and the movies.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“They thought we were in shock, I realized. They were treating us as if we were in shock. Then: We were in shock. Probably. This must be shock.”
― Ling Ma, Severance