Top 160 Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

102. “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

103. “You know, the point of a novel – or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people’s lives and inside their personal experiences.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

104. “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

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

106. “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

107. “But I never thought of who he wasn’t, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn’t even care what we talked about.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

108. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

109. “I don’t really have special rituals, but I don’t try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I’m truly concentrating.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

111. “Did I used to think being pretty was my primary obligation because I was in some way delusional? Or was it that I’d absorbed the messages I was meant to absorb with the same diligence with which I studied? As the mother of a daughter, I hope she won’t judge herself as harshly as I judged myself, but her personality is so unlike mine – she is boisterous and outspoken – that I’m not inordinately concerned.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

112. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

113. “Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

114. “Sometimes I think I’ve made so few mistakes that the public can remember all of them, in contrast to certain male politicians whose multitude of gaffes and transgressions gets jumbled in the collective imagination, either negated by one another or forgotten in the onslaught.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

115. “I like it when characters are some combination of appealing and maybe flawed or self-interested. I think in terms of scenes, and what I want a scene to achieve, and I think that the psychological realism arises from that.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

116. “And how heartbreaking, because if it were all just a few degrees different, she is pretty sure they could be quite happy together.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

117. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

118. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

119. “I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

120. “His ambitions exceed his talent.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

121. “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

122. “Oh, how different my life would have been had I not grown up in the same house with my grandmother, how much narrower and blander! 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 and contradictory place, and it had made me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

123. “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 – 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

124. “If you’re a parent in 2013, you have to get your hands on this book. Wise, engrossing, and so real that I fear Senior has been spying inside my house, All Joy is a must-read for those of us whose lives have been enriched and derailed by having kids.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

125. “Being called baby: like safaris and bowling leagues, a phenomenon she never thought she’d experience first hand.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

126. “Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you’re so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

127. “In general, I have no desire to ever have another conversation about Hillary Clinton, to debate the role her gender played. I’m not sure I want to have any conversation about sexism. If someone doesn’t see that gender played a huge role, why would I waste my time trying to convince them?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

128. “It’s hard to imagine him angry without them. It must be like watching a game show by yourself, how calling out the answers feels silly and pointless. What is fury without witnesses? Where’s the tension minus an audience to wonder what you’ll do next?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

129. “It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious- on Saturday nights, when there dances I didn’t go to, and during visitation... I spent those times hiding. Most of the other girls propped open their doors for visitation, but we kept ours shut.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

131. “Plus, it made me nervous, because was this the time in my own life before I found someone to love and had a family and looked back longingly on my youthful freedom? Or was it the beginning of what my life would be like forever?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

133. “I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea- I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I’d actually go.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

134. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

135. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

136. “I bet things would be easier for you if you either realized you’re not that weird or decided that being weird isn’t bad.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

137. “I don’t think it’s shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

138. “Liz felt the loneliness of confiding something true in a person who didn’t care.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

139. “And I didn’t yet understand that just because you can recognize what another person wants and just because that person is older and more powerful than you are, you don’t have to give it to them.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

140. “I’m old enough to know that sometimes you don’t get a second chance.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

141. “Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

142. “People who think my books are autobiographical, which they’re not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

143. “Other people were so unsuccessful at fending off love! Members of Congress who had affairs with their aides, or students who I’d known in college, girls who as freshmen declared themselves lesbians, then graduated with boyfriends- to give in to such love represents, for them, a capitulation or a betrayal, yet apparently the pull was so strong that they couldn’t resist. That was what I didn’t understand, how people made the leap from not mattering in each others’ lives to mattering.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

144. “Mark Twain say something about courage being the mastery of fear rather than the absence of fear?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

145. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

146. “It was one thingfor a person who didn’t really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then back away.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

147. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

148. “I was me, Hillary, but I also was a vessel and a proxy.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

149. “One of the most important lessons I’ve 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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

150. “And really, wasn’t this endless ruminating over my own likability in itself a thing only a woman would do? Did Bill – or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul – ever ponder their likability, or did they simply go after what they wanted? Did Bill ever stop to think about which of us was more qualified, did he question his own motives for entry into the race? The idea was laughable.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld