Top 160 Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Does ROTC mean his family couldn’t afford tuition?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

52. “It’s not that you’re wrong. But when you say stuff like this, it makes life a lot less enjoyable.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

53. “There are so many people who are so much better qualified to write about politics than I am.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

54. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

55. “The students’ announcements were lengthy – the longer roll call was, the shorter first period would be – and filled with double entendres: Boys’ soccer is practicing on Coates Field today, which, if you don’t know where it is, is behind the headmaster’s house, and if you still don’t know where it is, ask Fred. Where are you, Fred? You wanna raise your hand, man? There’s Fred, everyone see Fred? Okay, so Coates Field. And remember – bring your balls.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

57. “It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

58. “The fact is that in this day and age I don’t think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

59. “I’m not a Democrat because I haven’t thought about the issues. I’m a Democrat because I have.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

60. “I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

61. “My heart clutched – it was one of those moments when you feel time is a rug that’s been yanked out from under you; everything around you has changed so gradually that it is only all at one you look up and realize how different your life has become.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

62. “Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

64. “I contain multitudes.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

65. “My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

66. “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?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

67. “Part of getting what you want is asking for it.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

68. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

69. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

70. “Of course a magazine is usually more interesting than a conversation, because so much more time and preparation has gone into it.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

71. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

72. “I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention dos objects they profess to find repugnant.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

73. “For months I heard whispers and though it had seemed that they were carried to me on the wind, they were really coming from inside my own head.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

74. “When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

75. “I have been granted the terrible privilege of deciding what would have happened with no one left to contradict me. And maybe I am absolutely wrong.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

76. “Well – ” My mother paused, and her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is sad. “What I remember,” she said, “is that you were always such a dear little girl.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

77. “I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

78. “I liked being around other people during the day, and I was relieved to be alone late at night; it was the latter that made the former possible. In fact, setting up my nest often made me think of a Wordsworth phrase I’d learned in English class as a high school junior: emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

79. “I think that there’s some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

80. “I’m so trying to give up meat.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

81. “But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

82. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

83. “When I think of Henry and Oliver and Mike, I feel as if they are three different models – templates, almost – and 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. It would be arrogant to claim no other dynamics exist just because I haven’t experienced them, but I have to say that I can’t imagine what they are. I hope that I am wrong.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

84. “There’s a lot that’s not explained about the universe. And psychic-ness is not stranger than that.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

86. “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?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

87. “If I’m at somebody’s house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

88. “I think I write what’s interesting to me, and so if I’m reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that’s by someone else.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

89. “In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

90. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

91. “I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

92. “What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

93. “I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites? She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You’re sixteen. How can you already be a Republican?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

94. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

95. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

96. “I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

97. “There are two kinds of marriages: the ones where you’re privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you’re not.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

98. “Puteam continua sa fiu vechea Lee, cea buna si incompetenta, Lee cea draguta si plina de fisuri, un Labrador flocos si auriu, care nu poate sta departe de nicio balta si se tot intoarce acasa cu blana uda si mirosind neplacut.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

99. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

100. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld