Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes & Sayings

Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

You don't make waves unless there's a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that's it. You're a trouble make, and they never think of you any other way. — Curtis Sittenfeld

My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn't. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

I just write the books that I think I would want to read. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Does being forty feel fabulous and foxy? Liz asked. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I noticed then that the red-haired woman was buying the food you eat when you live alone: a box of cereal, a few apples, a plastic container of plain yogurt ... With an abrupt clarity, I saw how I had been launched into another category. I had been the red-haired woman; for a decade of my adult life, I had bought cereal and yogurt, I'd stood near couples and watched them nuzzle, and now I was part of such a couple. And I would not be launched back, I was certain. But I recognized her life, I knew it so well! I wanted to clasp her freckled hand, to say to her
surely we understood some shared code (or surely not, surely she'd have thought me preposterous)
It's good on the other side, but it's good on your side too. Enjoy it there. The loneliness is harder and the loneliness is the biggest part; but some things are easier. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn't dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we'll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which ... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Long ago I had become my own confidant. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Oh, how different my life would have been had I not grown up in the same house with my grandmother, how much narrower and blander! — Curtis Sittenfeld

Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places. — Curtis Sittenfeld

You don't need anyone else's approval or permission to enjoy the magic of writing. — Curtis Sittenfeld

To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door? — Curtis Sittenfeld

I guess I consider myself at times to have intuition. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

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

To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person. — Curtis Sittenfeld

When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

get more stupider. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

There's a lot that's not explained about the universe. And psychic-ness is not stranger than that. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Sometimes it amazes me how much these defining parts of our lives hinge on chance. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

Hannah is missing school because one night, her father exiled her and her mother and Allison from the house. This was, obviously, somewhat insane. But it wasn't more insane or cruel than other things he's done, which is not to say he's insane or cruel all the time. He's himself; he can be perfectly pleasant; he's the weather system they live with , and all the behavior, whenever he is around, hinges on his mood. Don't the three of them understand that living with him simply is what it is? To complain or resist would be as useless as complaining about or resisting a tornado. — Curtis Sittenfeld

When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm old enough to know that sometimes you don't get a second chance. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

My own preferences had little bearing on the outcome of events. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

There then occurred the first and only paranormal incident of my marriage. Charlie shifted in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked at me and, without preamble, said, "You have to forgive yourself for killing that boy." ... "For your own sake but for mine, too," he was saying, and his voice was hoarse from sleep yet also certain and insistent. "If you don't forgive yourself, you're making that accident too important, you're making him too important." Charlie paused. "And I want to be the love of your life. — Curtis Sittenfeld

How quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

As they faced each other, there was between them such a profusion of vitality that it was hard to know what to do with it; they kept making eye contact, looking away, making eye contact again. At last
surely he was thinking something similar and she was simply giving voice to the sentiment
she said, Want to go to your place and have hate sex? — Curtis Sittenfeld

You give too much attention to things that make you unhappy,' Allison says. No doubt she is right. And yet attending to things that make Hannah unhappy
it's such a natural reflex. It feels so intrinsic, it feels in some ways like who she is. The unflattering observations she makes about other people, the comments that get her in trouble, aren't these truer than small talk and thank-you notes? Worse, but truer. And underneath all the decorum, isn't most everyone judgmental and disappointed? Or is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them
can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in? — Curtis Sittenfeld

I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Once I had asked, 'But are you a Democrat or a Republican?" and Jonathan said, "I'm socially progressive but fiscally conservative," and Doug Miles, a football player who also came to Sunday breakfast but only ever read the sports section and ignored everyone, lifted his head and said, "Is that like being bisexual?" Which I actually thought was funny, even though I was pretty sure Doug was a jerk. — Curtis Sittenfeld

If it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids. — Curtis Sittenfeld

There are so many people who are so much better qualified to write about politics than I am. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

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

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I don't think it's shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you're so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Children are nothing but a problem people create and then congratulate themselves on solving. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

Whatever you are, be a good one.
-Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife) — Curtis Sittenfeld

Ordinarily, of course, I thought it best to remain inconspicuous, but the gesture had a certain irresistable theatricaility, and an inevitablility. Sometimes you can feel the pull of what other people want from you, and you sacrifice yourself, you risk seeming odd or sunsavory, to keep them entertained. — Curtis Sittenfeld

She would say that we create our own reality-that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe. — Curtis Sittenfeld

This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, and he wouldn't be entirely wrong - nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was always any of those thing, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn't pretty, and on top of that I didn't take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn't even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he'd somehow been mislead and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

Dena seemed about to respond, but instead, she belched again, a smaller belch that seemed unequal as a harbinger to the monstrous chunky gush that erupted from inside her. I held her hair back and looked away as she finished retching. Working with children had made me less squeamish
they were constantly presenting their grubby hands to your, having accidents
but at some point, disgusting was still disgusting, Especially with an adult woman. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

When I think of Henry and Oliver and Mike, I feel as if they are three different models - templates, almost - and 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. It would be arrogant to claim no other dynamics exist just because I haven't experienced them, but I have to say that I can't imagine what they are. I hope that I am wrong. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

Nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism." — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

She wasn't wrong, which wasn't the same as the idea being a wise one. — Curtis Sittenfeld

If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Just as some people enjoy knitting in front of the television, Mrs. Bennet was fond of perusing housewares catalogs; indeed, the sound of pages turning, that quick flap when no item caught her eye and the pauses when something did, the occasional businesslike lick of the index finger, was one of the essential sounds of Liz's childhood. This habit was also, apparently, what allowed Mrs. Bennet to maintain a belief that she had not actually "watched" a wide variety of shows even though she had been in the room for the duration of entire episodes and, in some cases, entire seasons. They — Curtis Sittenfeld

Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

You never know the nature of another couple's marriage, do you? — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

... 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

When you are the object of a person's affection, do you naturally credit him with a sympathetic heart and an understanding of the world? Perhaps your impression is right only insofar as it applies to you; in his presence, he is indeed possessed of these qualities for the very reason that you are the object of his affection. He is not observant so much as observant of you, not kind so much as kind toward you. — Curtis Sittenfeld

A reality show isn't unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, then," Mr. Bennet said. "In that they both require nominations. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

I take it you don't believe in love at first sight." "Does anyone over the age of thirteen? Do you?" "I don't, no," Darcy said. "But I don't rule out for others what I haven't experienced firsthand. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

Nin - " Jasper said, and his pained tone was a reminder that, however he had transgressed, he hadn't done so entirely callously. His affection for her was not fake; it just was partial. Or perhaps it was fake, he was faking emotion now, and he had a personality disorder; but between these possibilities, she preferred to see him as inadequate rather than clinically diagnosable. "I'm going to do better," he said. "Starting now, I'm getting my act together. Don't give up on me." "Oh, Jasper," Liz said. "I already have. — Curtis Sittenfeld

People recognized you or they didn't, and it was unrelated to knowing you. Knowing you could just be your name or the street you lived on, your father's job. Recognizing you was understanding you had thoughts in your head, finding the same things funny or excruciating, remembering what you'd said months or even years after you'd said — Curtis Sittenfeld

I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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