β
I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld
β
Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
We have to make mistakes, it's how we learn compassion for others.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
... nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn't want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That's the entire story, and if he doesn't kiss you, there is never a reason to wait around for him.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
Thereβs a belief that to take care of someone else, or to let someone else take care of youβthat both are inherently unfeminist. I donβt agree. Thereβs no shame in devoting yourself to another person, as long as he devotes himself to you in return.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Eligible)
β
What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Sisterland)
β
Arenβt 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?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Romantic Comedy)
β
The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
... it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld
β
I feel like a lot of life is distasteful and embarrassing. And you just push through it. You fix what you can, and you let time pass.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
It was a belated realization to have, but it occurred to me that perhaps this was how grown-up conversations workedβnot that your communication didnβt falter, but that you both made good-faith attempts to rectify things after it had.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Romantic Comedy)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
Sometimes when I speak, I feel like Iβm writing dialogue for the character of myself. Iβm impersonating a normal human when really Iβm a confused freak.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Romantic Comedy)
β
Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will--that is the part that's almost unbearable.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me - that I'd so rarely resisted, that I hadn't made it hard enough for him. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily - it wasn't locked at all - and you're standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn't romantic, but I wasn't sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people's time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Eligible)
β
She really does like him, she likes lying next to him, she wants to be around him; when you get down to it, can you say that about many people?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o'clock - these are enough. They are gifts.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
I'm old enough to know that sometimes you don't get a second chance.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice)
β
She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
Children are nothing but a problem people create and then congratulate themselves on solving.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Sisterland)
β
Itβs not that youβre wrong. But when you say stuff like this, it makes life a lot less enjoyable.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (You Think It, I'll Say It)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (You Think It, I'll Say It)
β
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?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
How quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld
β
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?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
I think my mother found her mother-in-law entertaining, and in a person who entertains us, there is much we forgive.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
...if it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
..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 werenβt funny.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
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 β I wanted my life to start β but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
If you're our age and single, dating kind of has to be an act of reckless optimism, right? The triumph of hope over experience?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Romantic Comedy)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld
β
β¦it never comes down to a single thing you did or didnβt do or say. You might convince yourself it did, but it didnβt.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
You know when true equality will be achieved? When a woman with...skeletons in her closet has the nerve to run for office.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Rodham)
β
All of which was to say that the sketches Iβd written over the years about the absurdity and arbitrariness of beauty standards for women had arisen not from my clear-eyed renunciation of them but from my resentment at their hold on me.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Romantic Comedy)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
Liz felt the loneliness of confiding something true in a person who didn't care.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
One of the most important lessons Iβve 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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Rodham)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice)
β
I did not care if Ella went to Princeton, if she was exceptionally pretty, if she grew up to marry a rich man, or really if she married at all - there were many incarnations of her I felt confident I could embrace, a hippie or a housewife or a career woman. But what I did care about, what I wanted most fervently, was for her to understand that hard work paid off, that decency begat decency, that humility was not a raincoat you occasionally pulled on when you thought conditions called for it, but rather a constant way of existing in the world, knowing that good luck and bad luck touched everyone and none of us was fully responsible for our fortunes or tragedies. Above all, I wanted my daughter to understand that many people were guided by bitterness and that it was best to avoid these individuals - their moods and behavior were a hornet's nest you had no possible reason to do anything other than bypass and ignore.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
Once I had asked, βBut are you a Democrat or a Republican?β and Jonathan said, βIβm socially progressive but fiscally conservative,β 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, βIs that like being bisexual?β Which I actually thought was funny, even though I was pretty sure Doug was a jerk.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadnβt 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 weβll 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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
To think of the Midwest as a whole as anything other than beautiful is to ignore the extraordinary power of the land. The lushness of the grass and trees in August, the roll of the hills (far less of the Midwest is flat than outsiders seem to imagine), the rich smell of soil, the evening sunlight over a field of wheat, or the crickets chirping at dusk on a residential street: All of it, it has always made me feel at peace. There is room to breathe, there is a realness of place. The seasons are extreme, but they pass and return, pass and return, and the world seems far steadier than it does from the vantage point of a coastal city.
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 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. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard...and a beauty that I can't help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, Iβd think how girlsβ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or thereβs no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, thereβs waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
β
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?
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)
β
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.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife)
β
But maybe this is what Hannah has always wanted: a man who will deny her. A man of her own who isn't hers. Isn't it the real reason she broke up with Mike--not because he moved to North Carolina for law school (he wanted her to go with him, and she said no) but because he adored her? If she asked him to get out of bed and bring her a glass of water, he did. If she was in a bad mood, he tried to soothe her. It didn't bother him if she cried, or if she didn't wash her hair or shave her legs or have anything interesting to say. He forgave it all, he always thought she was beautiful, he always wanted to be around her. It became so boring! She'd been raised, after all, not to be accommodated but to accommodate, and if she was his world, then his world was small, he was easily satisfied. After a while, when he parted her lips with his tongue, she'd think, Thrash, thrash, here we go. She wanted to feel like she was striving cleanly forward, walking into a bracing wind and learning from her mistakes, and she felt instead like she was sitting in a deep, squishy sofa, eating Cheetos, in an overheated room. With Oliver, there is always contrast to shape their days, tension to keep them on their toes: You are far form me, you are close to me. We are fighting, we are getting along.
β
β
Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams)