Quotes from Curtis Sittenfeld

and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren't funny.

There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

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.

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

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?

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

It was a belated realization to have, but it occurred to me that perhaps this was how grown-up conversations worked—not that your communication didn't falter, but that you both made good-faith attempts to rectify things after it had.

She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

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.

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.

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.

I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony.

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

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

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?

Aren't we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?

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.

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.

One of the most important lessons I've learned in life is this: Do not preemptively take no for an answer. Do not decide your request has been rejected before it officially has. As with so many other lessons that involve assertion, this one applies far more to women than men.

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

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.

You know when true equality will be achieved? When a woman with...skeletons in her closet has the nerve to run for office.

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.