Quotes from 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

Long ago I had become my own confidant.

If this was all I ever got, it would be the best thing that had ever happened to me, and if this was all I ever got, I'd never stop wanting more of it.

Dude, he said, Calm down. This was something I hated being told, especially by a boy. My voice might rise half an octave, I thought of telling him, but there's no need to take cover - I will not leap from my chair to embrace you, I will not even shriek with delight.

alchemy of friendship, to mutually transform the humiliation of life into private jokes?

We both were smiling, and I loved him, I loved him completely, and I knew that he loved me back. I could feel it. That moment- inside it, I could anticipate the thing I most wanted and I could be beyond it, it had happened already, and I was ensconced in the rich reassurance of knowing it was certain and definite.

Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library- this was when I walked down the aisle and he was waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, every reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together.

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.

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.

though as secrets went, this wasn't great. The kind I preferred were about specific people.

And really, what has stayed with me from that vacation as much as my own suspicious, petty agonizing is my father on the esplanade just after our arrival. The wind blew his hair, and he was fidgety with delight, straining to explain to my mother and me exactly why the Mighty Mac was so impressive. I wondered at the time—I wonder still—if that was the happiest my father had ever been.

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.

No, we were still in the same room, both of us having to breathe and speak in the aftermath of her wink.

Did he, in a way he was unable to articulate, actually like my strong will? Or did he mistake me for a typical woman, was he game to be my boyfriend not because I was Hillary and distinctly myself but because I possessed the standard feminine qualities that a college-educated man in the late 1960s might wish for? Did he not understand that I was special?

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.

It turns out a disproportionate number of people in the music industry grew up privileged, and many of them will go to great lengths to make you think otherwise. For sure, there are also a lot of musicians who overcame obstacles, including no money, and those people are usually more talented and much more enjoyable to hang out with.

Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can't shake the sense that they're too picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places—Princeton, New Jersey, say, or Farmington, Connecticut—seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm.

Sort of on this topic…I know this is a loaded question coming from me, but what would you say is your relationship with drinking and alcohol? You mentioned having "grapefruit seltzer water on the rocks" when your stepdad has a cocktail

Oh my God, Hillary, if a Republican is elected, I'm screwed because all they want to do is take away Obamacare.

working out is such an important way of maintaining an even keel with regard to sobriety

Though Chip's tears during the exchange of vows weren't a surprise, their duration and magnitude was a spectacle unlike any Liz had ever witnessed.

His panel was on the digital divide

Sometimes I think I've made so few mistakes that the public can remember all of them, in contrast to certain male politicians whose multitude of gaffes and transgressions gets jumbled in the collective imagination, either negated by one another or forgotten in the onslaught. The less you screw up, the more clearly the public keeps track of each error.

Go home, put on a pretty dress, some heels, and some lipstick, flirt with him, flatter him, and never forget how insecure men are. It's because they take themselves far too seriously.