Top 160 Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We all make mistakes, don’t we? But if you can’t forgive yourself, you’ll always be an exile in your own life.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

2. “Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

3. “In life we’re most hell-bent on proving things that we’re not really sure are true.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

4. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

5. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

6. “I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

7. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

8. “I just write the books that I think I would want to read.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

9. “There are a lot of things in the world that are a lot weirder than psychic abilities, that we accept as true.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

10. “I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

11. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

12. “I’m able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

13. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

14. “I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

15. “We have to make mistakes, its how we learn compassion for others.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

16. “High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you’re there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

17. “There are people we treat wrong and later, we’re prepared to treat other people right.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

18. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

20. “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?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

22. “The margin between staying and leaving was so thin; really, it could have gone either way.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

23. “I guess because twins have this mystique, and triplets – I think the normal sibling connection potentially can be very powerful, and there’s this idea that it’s even more powerful. It really is, not just someone like me, but another version of me.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

24. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

25. “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?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

26. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

28. “But sometimes speaking is so hard! It’s like standing still, then sprinting.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

29. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

30. “And I want a woman in that seat. Whether it’s Alan Dixon or Joe Biden or George Bush, I’m so tired of these idiot men getting to make up the rules for the rest of us. They’re not smarter. They’re not nicer. They don’t have better judgment. They’re just men.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

31. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

33. “I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that’s exciting.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

34. “And the reason I’m telling you all this is that I want you to know no one in my life has ever made me feel worse about myself than you.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

35. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

37. “Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person – not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way – I don’t think that’s exploitive.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

38. “Dena seemed about to respond, but instead, she belched again, a smaller belch that seemed unequal as a harbinger to the monstrous chunky gush that erupted from inside her. I held her hair back and looked away as she finished retching. Working with children had made me less squeamish – they were constantly presenting their grubby hands to your, having accidents – but at some point, disgusting was still disgusting, Especially with an adult woman.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

39. “I think I would have liked to have been a twin. Sometimes my sisters and I get mistaken for twins, and I always take it as a compliment.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

40. “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 running out of things to say.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

41. “I don’t think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, “I need a little more psychological realism.””

— Curtis Sittenfeld

42. “It’s never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it’s an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

43. “I feel like as I’ve gotten older I’ve unfortunately come to the decision that a lot of people who seem normal and boring maybe are normal and boring.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

44. “It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

45. “Anyone who’s really interested in anything spends time alone.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

46. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

47. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

48. “There’s no better investment than your cleavage.” Charlotte smirked. “I believe they teach that in business school.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

49. “To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

50. “Does ROTC mean his family couldn’t afford tuition?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld