Top 100 Sittenfeld Quotes
#1. Whatever you are, be a good one.
-Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
Curtis Sittenfeld
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism."
Curtis Sittenfeld
#5. 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
#6. I think my mother found her mother-in-law entertaining, and in a person who entertains us, there is much we forgive.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#7. I wonder if they are the only three in the world: the man who is with you completely, the man who is with you but not with you, the man who will get as close to you as he can without ever becoming yours.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#8. But I never thought of who he wasn't, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn't even care what we talked about.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#9. She would say that we create our own reality-that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#11. I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Only part you have to apologize for is getting me all horned up and then passing out, but I'll take a rain check
Curtis Sittenfeld
#16. And how heartbreaking, because if it were all just a few degrees different, she is pretty sure they could be quite happy together.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#19. I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#20. There's no better investment than your cleavage." Charlotte smirked. "I believe they teach that in business school.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The fact that I had no opinion on, for instance, relations between the U.S. And China did nit mean I didn't feel things.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. There was a way in which my grandmother's true self was not these guests' business; no one's true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#30. Mama!' Rosie tugged on my shirt. 'This broccoli is tasty and wonderful'.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#31. 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
#32. Well
" My mother paused, and her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is sad. "What I remember," she said, "is that you were always such a dear little girl.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#33. 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
#34. She wasn't wrong, which wasn't the same as the idea being a wise one.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#35. What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#36. I seriously think he's one of those dudes where, his whole life, he's gotten credit for being smart and moral for no reason other than he's tall. Anyway,
Curtis Sittenfeld
#37. I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#38. It struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#40. (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
#41. 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
#42. ... it never comes down to a single thing you did or didn't do or say. You might convince yourself it did, but it didn't.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#43. I think I would have liked to have been a twin. Sometimes my sisters and I get mistaken for twins, and I always take it as a compliment.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#44. In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#46. We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#47. 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
#50. 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
#51. All things being equal, why not be married to a rich man? (Somewhere, Hannah thinks, there must be a needlepoint pillow asking this very question in a cleverer way.)
Curtis Sittenfeld
#52. 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
#53. The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can't or won't treat you as well as you're accustomed.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#54. Before and after ... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#55. A reality show isn't unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, then," Mr. Bennet said. "In that they both require nominations.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#56. Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn't.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, "At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites?" She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You're sixteen. How can you already be a Republican?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#65. He's a lawyer in Atlanta, and he's very active in his church," Mrs. Bennet said. "If that's not the description of a man looking for a wife, I don't know what is.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#66. And now I knew myself to be generous with encouragement only when I either did not want the thing the other person sought of did not believe the person would really get it.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#67. The tarps Ken Weinrich's crew used has yellow and royal blue stripes, not unlike those for a circus, and this had lent a festive yet undignified mood to the proceedings.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#68. 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
#69. It was one thingfor a person who didn't really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then back away.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#70. Of course, I didn't imagine then that I could have had a real relationship with any guy. I thought that by virtue of being me I was disqualified.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#75. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#81. When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#82. I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn't want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#87. 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
#88. If it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#89. At such moments, I felt that we were like the people in California who live in enormous houses on the sides of cliffs, ghat our lives were beautiful but precarious, their foundations vulnerable.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#90. I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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