Olga Ravn

From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.

My Work

This is how I feel when I’m doing mundane collections work at the Benton

Clark Louis

And I feel how, here, by the clothesline, I become invisible to the world but clear to myself

When I got pregnant, wrote Anna, I became obsessed with averageness. I wanted to give birth to an average child. Of an average height and weight. With an average number of fingers and toes. This was how I would protect the child against death.

this book is incredibly sorrowful at times but it is really amusing here and there. 

Like?????? Every other line is incredible. I love this book so so so much

When Adam named everything in the Garden of Eden, was he in fact doing the work of a housewife?

I’m so sad and come to think of it, I don’t even know what qualifications I have.”

When Marx wrote that work should be outsourced to machines so the worker could instead write poetry in the morning, who did he imagine would change the diapers?

I told Aksel I was afraid my writing was too pretentious, and he assured me: "The last thing you need to worry about is being pretentious, Anna." Compliment or insult?

This coming from a man who pronounces Paris without an s.

It’s hard to imagine these feelings never leaving.

…Anna expected to be diagnosed with a grave chronic illness and simultaneously thrown out for suffering from nothing but a weakness of the soul.

It is a quote from Novalis, but the way it’s inserted into the book is incredibly beautiful and made my chest well. 

the poem heals / the wound inflicted by reason

My Work quotes

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