Eligible Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

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.

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.

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

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?

Liz felt the loneliness of confiding something true in a person who didn't care.

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.

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times. —Mark Twain

As they sat, Kathy de Bourgh smiled and said, “Now that we’ve both apologized within the first thirty seconds of our conversation about women and power, shall we begin?

Sometimes it amazes me how much these defining parts of our lives hinge on chance.

I'd think, One of the times she leaves will be the last time I see her. It destroyed me. I didn't want us to have a last time, and that was how I realized I'd fallen in love with you.

I take it you don’t believe in love at first sight.” “Does anyone over the age of thirteen? Do you?” “I don’t, no,” Darcy said. “But I don’t rule out for others what I haven’t experienced firsthand.

He seemed simultaneously like a stranger and someone she knew extremely well; there was either an enormous amount to say or nothing at all.

A reality show isn’t unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, then,” Mr. Bennet said. “In that they both require nominations.

she might even have felt that self-congratulatory pride that heterosexual white people are known to experience due to proximate diversity.

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.

If I moved back, I’m sure I’d find some great place to live. I wouldn’t have to make a reservation to take a spin class or wait in line just to get into the grocery store. But then I’d look up one day and be like, ‘What the fuck have I done?’ 

It was generally less shocking to Liz that twenty years after high school she was still her essential self, the self she’d grown up as, unencumbered by spouse or child, than that nearly everyone else had changed, moved on, and multiplied. After

I contain multitudes

He’s a lawyer in Atlanta, and he’s very active in his church,” Mrs. Bennet said. “If that’s not the description of a man looking for a wife, I don’t know what is.

Does being forty feel fabulous and foxy?” Liz asked.

There's no better investment than your cleavage." Charlotte smirked. "I believe they teach that in business school.

As they faced each other, there was between them such a profusion of vitality that it was hard to know what to do with it; they kept making eye contact, looking away, making eye contact again. At last--surely he was thinking something similar and she was simply giving voice to the sentiment--she said, "Want to go to your place and have hate sex?

Liz and Willie were passing a miniature chateau--even in its modified version, it was seven or eight thousand square feet--and Liz said, "I guess I'm a Cincinnati opportunist. In New York, I play the wholesome-midwesterner card, but when I'm back here, I consider myself to be a chic outsider." Even before Willie replied, Liz felt the loneliness of having confided something true in a person who didn't care.

Here’s what I’ve learned about the people in this city,” Darcy was saying. “They grade their women on a curve. If someone is described as sophisticated, it means once during college she visited Paris, and if someone is described as beautiful, it means she’s fifteen pounds overweight instead of forty. And

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

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

Does ROTC mean his family couldn’t afford tuition?

I seriously think he’s one of those dudes where, his whole life, he’s gotten credit for being smart and moral for no reason other than he’s tall. Anyway,

Mr. Bennet stood, dropping his napkin on the table. “As interesting as I find this conversation, an urgent matter has come up. I need a hamburger.

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

The tarps Ken Weinrich's crew used has yellow and royal blue stripes, not unlike those for a circus, and this had lent a festive yet undignified mood to the proceedings.

Not only will I be there,” Liz said, “but I’ll be impersonating a pleasant woman with great manners.

Sometimes it amazes me how much these defining parts of our lives hinge on chance.

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?

Then she was in a different part of the club, and she and Kitty were dancing to a rap song they both knew all the words to, and Kitty was wearing a thin plastic headband with antennae off of which wobbled life-sized sparkly pink penises. How marvelous this headband was! Even more marvelously, Kitty pointed out that Liz was wearing an identical one. Truly, it was a magical night.

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

Just as some people enjoy knitting in front of the television, Mrs. Bennet was fond of perusing housewares catalogs; indeed, the sound of pages turning, that quick flap when no item caught her eye and the pauses when something did, the occasional businesslike lick of the index finger, was one of the essential sounds of Liz’s childhood. This habit was also, apparently, what allowed Mrs. Bennet to maintain a belief that she had not actually “watched” a wide variety of shows even though she had been in the room for the duration of entire episodes and, in some cases, entire seasons. They

It occurred to Liz one day, as she waited on hold for an estimate from a yard service, that her parents’ home was like an extremely obese person who could no longer see, touch, or maintain jurisdiction over all of his body; there was simply too much of it, and he—they—had grown weary and inflexible. During

Yet surely she was as culpable as he was; recalling her casual speculation about when Jasper's wife's grandmother might die and thereby free Jasper and Susan to divorce, Liz wondered if a stronger sign of a relationship's essential corruptness could exist than for its official realization to hinge on the demise of another human being.

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.

Among the women, a spontaneous cheer went up, which Liz was surprised to find herself joining, and this was when (she was on her fifth drink) she realized both that she was completely drunk--not just tipsy, not merely buzzed--and also that she was much happier than she'd been an hour or two before. She felt a retroactive remorse for all the Eligible contestants she'd deemed trashy and idiotic from the comfort of her living room; apparently, like teriyaki pizza and bee venom facials, getting wasted on a reality-TV show was not to be knocked until tried.

Upon receiving that text from Georgie, she had, of course, wondered, Heard what? But she'd quickly gone from wondering to suspecting that she knew to being certain. Never would she have leapt to a conclusion this way when writing an article, never would she have allowed a fact to be alluded to without clarification. Trust but verify--that's what she'd have done. Yet not once in the past three months had she even attempted clarification. How sloppily, and with what slim evidence, she had embraced the disappointment of her own desires. Why on earth had she been so ready for, so complicit in, the denial of what she most wanted?

But she actually was glad to have identified the one thing about Jasper she’d change, because it was similar to realizing what you’d forgotten to take on a trip, and if it was only perfume, as opposed to your driver’s license, you were relieved.

Nin—” Jasper said, and his pained tone was a reminder that, however he had transgressed, he hadn’t done so entirely callously. His affection for her was not fake; it just was partial. Or perhaps it was fake, he was faking emotion now, and he had a personality disorder; but between these possibilities, she preferred to see him as inadequate rather than clinically diagnosable. “I’m going to do better,” he said. “Starting now, I’m getting my act together. Don’t give up on me.” “Oh, Jasper,” Liz said. “I already have.

About a year before, Kitty and Lydia had embraced CrossFit, the intense strength and conditioning regimen that involved weight lifting, kettle bells, battle ropes, obscure acronyms, the eschewal of most foods other than meat, and a derisive attitude toward the weak and unenlightened masses who still believed that jogging was a sufficient workout and a bagel was an acceptable breakfast.

Jane resembled nothing so much as a pregnant angel. She

When they left the bar, before parting ways in Port Authority, they stood on the corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue and continued talking; there were between them always an infinite number of subjects to be addressed and dissected, mulled over and mocked and revised.

you certainly should

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.

…There was a fantasy aspect to our time together that I don’t think prepared us for some of the mundane daily struggles life has in store.

Liz felt the loneliness of having confided something true to a person who didn’t care.

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

I take it you don't believe in love at first sight.' 'Does anyone over the age of thirteen? Do you?' 'I don't, no,' Darcy said. 'But I don't rule out for others what I haven't experienced first hand.

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.

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

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

Tease me all you like, but the clock is ticking. No, Jane doesn’t look like she’ll be forty in November, but any man who knows her age will think long and hard about what that means. And Liz isn’t far behind her.” “Plenty of men don’t want children.” Mr. Bennet took a sip of coffee. “I’m still not sure that I do.

Unlike your mother, I don’t care whom any of you marries or, frankly, if you marry,” Mr. Bennet said. “The institution hasn’t done much for me, Lord knows.” “That’s a nice sentiment.” Liz patted her father’s knee. “Thank you for sharing.

CrossFit, the intense strength and conditioning regimen that involved weight lifting, kettle bells, battle ropes, obscure acronyms, the eschewal of most foods other than meat, and a derisive attitude toward the weak and unenlightened masses who still believed that jogging was a sufficient workout and a bagel was an acceptable breakfast.

quantity, at

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

Even our challenges here have made our lives richer and deepened our ability to feel. Our family has been very lucky to live somewhere beautiful.

But still, Liz was unwilling to grant them access to her new and wondrous romance; she loved Darcy too much to prove her love to anyone except him.

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