Quotes from Curtis Sittenfeld

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.

Not only will I be there," Liz said, "but I'll be impersonating a pleasant woman with great manners.

Since Liz's adolescence, when viewing television commercials that celebrated the ostensibly unconditional love of mothers for their children, or on spotting merchandise in stores that honored this unique bond with poems or effusive declarations—picture frames, magnets, oven mitts—she had felt like a foreign exchange student observing the customs of another country.

I'm not going to say the rule doesn't exist, but it's like Santa Claus. It's only real if you believe in it.

Liz had tried not to experience the doubly insulting sting of being excluded by a person she didn't care for.

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.

she was at times most able to enjoy her family members when she could sense their presence nearby without actually interacting with them.

Autocorrect can happen to anyone, but I seriously don't understand what goes on between him and his phone.

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.

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.

From then on, as long as I was at Ault, I would never be alone. Martha and I would get along, our friendship would last. I felt certainty and relief. Years later, I heard a minister at a wedding describe marriage as cutting sorrow in half and doubling joy, and what I thought of was not the guy I was seeing then, nor even of some perfect, imaginary husband I might meet later; I thought immediately of Martha.

I am filled with gratitude at the astonishing fact of being married to someone I enjoy talking to, someone with whom I can't imagine ever running out of things to say.

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

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?

If I'll never know how much this was my path because of fate and how much because I willed it, the question is less important than that I made it across. Now other women know they, too, can make it, and not because I or anyone else tells them. They know because they've seen it happen.

Does ROTC mean his family couldn't afford tuition?

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." Within

the things that made me most myself were a romantic turnoff, that no one would simultaneously value my intellect and find me attractive; I had wanted so badly to be wrong, and I'd struggled to find evidence that I was.

the good news would be that it would be such a vividly humiliating experience that surely I'd derive personal and professional inspiration from it for years to come.

I will not be the one it happens to - this is what we all believe, what we must believe to make our way in the world each day. Someone else. Not me. But every once in a while it is you, or someone close enough that it might as well be you. 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.

Now I think, Jean. Jean! You got your wish! The fire drill is finished, but so is everything else. Did we believe we could pick and choose the parts that passed so quickly? Today, even the boring parts, even when it was freezing outside and half the girls were barefoot- all of it was a long time ago.

Such compliments—they were thrilling but almost impossible to absorb in this quantity, at this pace. It was like she was being pelted with a 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. And

Jane resembled nothing so much as a pregnant angel. She

There are two kinds of marriages," Barbara said. "The ones where you're privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you're not.