Top 100 Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes
#2. But she actually was glad to have identified the one thing about Jasper she'd change, because it was similar to realizing what you'd forgotten to take on a trip, and if it was only perfume, as opposed to your driver's license, you were relieved.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#3. I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#5. As they sat, Kathy de Bourgh smiled and said, Now that we've both apologized within the first thirty seconds of our conversation about women and power, shall we begin?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#6. Fred!" the nurse said, though they had never met. "How are we today?" Reading the nurse's name tag, Mr. Bennet replied with fake enthusiasm, "Bernard! We're mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#7. When they left the bar, before parting ways in Port Authority, they stood on the corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue and continued talking; there were between them always an infinite number of subjects to be addressed and dissected, mulled over and mocked and revised.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#8. The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#9. She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#10. I decided we should get married no more of this running-through-the-rain shit. We should live in the same place, sleep in the same bed at night, wake up together in the morning, and whenever there's a tornado, I can take care of you and watch Baseball at the same time.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#11. My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn't.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#12. I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#13. I felt an old, visceral insecurity that manifested itself in an impulse to cover up our cribbage game, to literally shield the board with my hands.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#14. I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#15. My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#16. Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#17. A reality show isn't unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, then," Mr. Bennet said. "In that they both require nominations.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#18. Such compliments
they were thrilling but almost impossible to absorb in this quantity, at this pace. It was like she was being pelted with magnificent hail, and she wished she could save the individual stones to examine later, but they'd exist with such potency only now, in this moment.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#19. Maybe I have always been, as Vi would subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself than looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#20. I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#21. Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable? Sometimes [his] gestures and inflections were so mercilessly familiar that it was as if he were an extension of me, an element of my own personality over which I had little control.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#22. To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#23. In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#24. I have been granted the terrible privilege of deciding what would have happened with no one left to contradict me. And maybe I am absolutely wrong.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#25. For months I heard whispers and though it had seemed that they were carried to me on the wind, they were really coming from inside my own head.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#26. If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That's the entire story, and if he doesn't kiss you, there is never a reason to wait around for him.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#27. It was generally less shocking to Liz that twenty years after high school she was still her essential self, the self she'd grown up as, unencumbered by spouse or child, than that nearly everyone else had changed, moved on, and multiplied. After
Curtis Sittenfeld
#28. If it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#29. People are complicated," she continued, "and the ones who aren't are boring."
"Then maybe I'm boring."
We looked at each other, and in a genuinely sad voice, she said, "Maybe you are.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#30. Nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#31. Her prettiness was factual and obvious, the way a flag was patriotic or a puppy was cute - not an interesting prettiness, but also not contingent on taste.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#32. I like it when characters are some combination of appealing and maybe flawed or self-interested. I think in terms of scenes, and what I want a scene to achieve, and I think that the psychological realism arises from that.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#33. See, I always forget this about you," he says, and even now, long after we first lost our privacy, I can't help wondering who's overhearing him. "Every decade, you like to pin me to the ground, pull open my mouth, and take a sh** right into it.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#34. When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#35. I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#36. My heart clutched - it was one of those moments when you feel time is a rug that's been yanked out from under you; everything around you has changed so gradually that it is only all at one you look up and realize how different your life has become.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#37. If you're a parent in 2013, you have to get your hands on this book. Wise, engrossing, and so real that I fear Senior has been spying inside my house, All Joy is a must-read for those of us whose lives have been enriched and derailed by having kids.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#38. (as a single woman in my early thirties, I was careful not to coo excessively over other people's infants, lest it seem like I was telegraphing my desperation; the necessity of this precaution annoyed me, making me want to defiantly announce that I'd always liked babies,
Curtis Sittenfeld
#40. Whatever you are, be a good one.
-Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
Curtis Sittenfeld
#41. Mr. Bennet stood, dropping his napkin on the table. As interesting as I find this conversation, an urgent matter has come up. I need a hamburger.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#42. By the time we met up again, she'd be able to hand her reaction to me as a tidy package: a single square of lasagna in a sealed Tupperware container as opposed to a squalid kitchen with tomato sauce splattered on the counters. And I wouldn't have to be there while she got it in order.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#43. I guess because twins have this mystique, and triplets - I think the normal sibling connection potentially can be very powerful, and there's this idea that it's even more powerful. It really is, not just someone like me, but another version of me.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#44. And I didn't yet understand that just because you can recognize what another person wants and just because that person is older and more powerful than you are, you don't have to give it to them.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#47. And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction
so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#48. I feel like a lot of life is distasteful and embarrassing. And you just push through it. You fix what you can, and you let time pass.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#49. I actually liked the disolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were to ever kill myself, I thought it would be in the summer.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#50. I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#52. She would say that we create our own reality-that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#53. I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that's exciting.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#54. There's a belief that to take care of someone else, or to let someone else take care of you - that both are inherently unfeminist. I don't agree. There's no shame in devoting yourself to another person, as long as he devotes himself to you in return.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#55. At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#56. But then I think how I grew sick of kissing him. How can you spend your life with a person you're sick of kissing?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#59. I feel like as I've gotten older I've unfortunately come to the decision that a lot of people who seem normal and boring maybe are normal and boring.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#61. In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#62. If I moved back, I'm sure I'd find some great place to live. I wouldn't have to make a reservation to take a spin class or wait in line just to get into the grocery store. But then I'd look up one day and be like, 'What the fuck have I done?'
Curtis Sittenfeld
#63. There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#64. What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#65. If he didn't fully understand where I came from, he understood who I was now
he knew how well done I liked my steak, knew the color of my toothbrush, the expression I made when I realized I'd forgotten to roll up my car window before it rained.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#66. I think adults forget just how much faith teenagers can have in them, just how willing to believe that adults, by virtue of being adults, know absolute truths, or that absolute truths are even knowable.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#67. Mama!' Rosie tugged on my shirt. 'This broccoli is tasty and wonderful'.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#68. It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#69. Rudolph Walsh, you are my fierce advocate, and your wit and wisdom
Curtis Sittenfeld
#70. I won't claim I've never in my life done anything I'm ashamed of, but I haven't done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I've made, that's fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#71. There's a lot that's not explained about the universe. And psychic-ness is not stranger than that.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#72. I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#74. Sometimes it amazes me how much these defining parts of our lives hinge on chance.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#75. Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#76. It's hard to imagine him angry without them. It must be like watching a game show by yourself, how calling out the answers feels silly and pointless. What is fury without witnesses? Where's the tension minus an audience to wonder what you'll do next?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#77. Being called baby: like safaris and bowling leagues, a phenomenon she never thought she'd experience first hand.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#78. Of course a magazine is usually more interesting than a conversation, because so much more time and preparation has gone into it.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#79. Time seemed, as it always does in adulthood after a particular stretch has concluded, no matter how ponderous or unpleasant the stretch was to endure, to have passed quickly indeed.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#80. You don't need anyone else's approval or permission to enjoy the magic of writing.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#81. My own preferences had little bearing on the outcome of events.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#82. There are so many people who are so much better qualified to write about politics than I am.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#83. I don't think it's shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#84. People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#85. You know what her punishment is for tormenting you way back when?" he said.
I looked at him.
He said, "her punishment is being her,
Curtis Sittenfeld
#86. You never know the nature of another couple's marriage, do you?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#87. I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#88. I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#89. I'm able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#90. I want to open myself up, I want to experience other dimensions, I don't want to be bound by the rules of this world. Does that make me a freak?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#91. She nodded, jotting something in her notebook.
You're writing that down? Has the interview started?
Lee, whenever you're talking to a reporter, you're being interviewed.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#92. I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention dos objects they profess to find repugnant
Curtis Sittenfeld
#93. You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#94. I'd think, One of the times she leaves will be the last time I see her. It destroyed me. I didn't want us to have a last time, and that was how I realized I'd fallen in love with you.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#95. I think that there's some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#96. How quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#97. High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#98. In my expectation that good fortune will lead inextricably to its reversal, I should note that I don't think I'm less deserving of happiness than anyone else; it is that in an unequal world, nobody deserves the privileges I enjoy.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#99. I'm not a Democrat because I haven't thought about the issues. I'm a Democrat because I have.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#100. She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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