Quotes from Curtis Sittenfeld

Just so I understand—" Noah Brewster said, and the confusion on his face made me wonder if he'd turn out to be one of the ding-dongs.

don't blame myself for the broad general failures for which I am held responsible by my detractors. To others, I am a symbol; to myself, I have only ever been me.

Wordsworth phrase I'd learned in English class as a high school junior: emotion recollected in tranquillity.

They only half-jokingly speculated about whether they were the last two single people from their high school class

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

but I knew from Silicon Valley fundraisers that there was little a tech billionaire found more pleasing than the pretense that his innovations made life more equitable and meaningful.

The Wisconsin land, scraped and rearranged by glaciers, accosted by tornadoes, drenched and dried out and drenched again—it didn't care what I had done.

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.

There had been certain things I'd wanted badly in my childhood, and instead of getting them, I'd grown up; I did not want them any longer.

Mama!' Rosie tugged on my shirt. 'This broccoli is tasty and wonderful'.

I always had prepared, and I always knew I could do it.

I've never tried to assert my views unless they are self-evident, not reliant on an argument from me to prove or disprove them: Breast-cancer awareness and AIDS prevention are good. Illiteracy is bad. Historic preservation will allow future generations to understand what life used to be like and in so doing will help Americans chart a path forward. The issues and decisions that are more complex I have left to others, to those confident of their own rightness.

People to whom a terrible thing has never happened trust fate, the notion that what's meant to be, will be. The rest of us know better.

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose—what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?—and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

Sure, I believed the worst of myself but - not really. I was always waiting to be proven wrong.

we create our own reality—that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.

Truthfully, the main thing I study in my study is the TV screen. My bedroom is where I read.

That Mark's a pediatric cardiologist mostly offsets—to me, if not to everyone—how he's also kind of an asshole.

It's remarkable, isn't it, Mr. Bennet said, that for decades at a time, I've stayed alive without your daily instructions?

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

As I headed around the circle,the air smelled like burning leaves and the campus was shot with that Amber light you see only in the fall, and I felt, as I often did at Ault, both as if I were undeserving and as if the beauty around me was not really mine.

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, so long as he devotes himself to you in return.

The room was silent, and then my grandmother said, "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.

Yet even so, the margin between staying and leaving was so thin. Really, it could have gone either way. Sometimes I think that my years of diligent schoolwork and political idealism had given me the erroneous notion that if one choice, one plan, was hard and the other was easy, doing the hard thing was inherently better—worthier, more upstanding.