Top 180 Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Autocorrect can happen to anyone, but I seriously don’t understand what goes on between him and his phone.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

155. “Could it be that Noah was one of those rare guys who didn’t essentially dislike or mock women, and who also didn’t ignore our existence, and who also didn’t see us primarily as objects of lust? That he was weirdly, disarmingly fine with us?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

156. “Something inside me clenched. So often, people let you down; so often, situations turn out disappointingly. But occasionally someone recognizes, acknowledges, your private and truest self.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

157. “All of which was to say that the sketches I’d 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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

158. “Because my mother hadn’t been an ostentatious or performative person, it had taken me a long time, until college really, to realize how smart and funny she was, and how generously compassionate.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

159. “If you were a writer, you could be impressive in a cerebral sort of way, but if you were a musician, you got to be viscerally magical.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

160. “You know the advice about how you should always play tennis with people better than you? When I’m talking to you, I’m a funnier and smarter version of myself because you’re funny and smart.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

161. “I don’t like cucumber because the best part of a cucumber tastes like the worst part of a watermelon.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

162. “A lesson I learned from Bill, a lesson that perhaps should be obvious, though there’s evidence that most other people don’t know it, either, is that direct and sincere compliments are shockingly effective – that they feel wonderful. What in theory should sound saccharine or manipulative rarely does in practice, so long as you believe the other person really means it. And we crave praise not, I think, because most of us are egomaniacal. It’s because we’re human.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

163. “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?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

164. “I don’t get why you’d write scripts for romantic comedies if you think romance is cheesy nonsense.” “That’s just it, though,” I said. “I don’t write from a point of clarity. I write out of confusion.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

165. “A sense of humor is always a bonus. As with dinner companions, so it is with short stories.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

166. “His expression became both very tender and very amused, as if there were an excellent inside joke between us, and he tilted his head to the right and looked at me with a focused kind of sweetness and warmth.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

167. “In my youth, I had respected my father’s intelligence, not recognizing how much sharper my mother’s was because hers was concealed by being pleasant and female.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

168. “And if I was looking at that, would I pick you out from everyone else and say, ‘That’s the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen’? If I’m being honest, no. But human beings aren’t static images. We’re dynamic and kinetic, and it’s like I said before – right away, I wanted to talk to you, and every time I’ve talked to you since I’ve always wanted to keep talking to you.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

169. “A dystopian story must not merely be dystopian; it must also be a story. Premise can only get you so far.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

170. “I knew how when you really liked a boy, all the little daily incidents shrank and slipped away. You carried around you anticipation of seeing him again and retrieved it when you felt bored or anxious, like a memory of something good.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

171. “Aren’t 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?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

172. “In all seriousness, I think one of my problems at Ault was that I tried too hard to learn lessons. I didn’t recognize how much of the time life is just random. And often the lesson I thought I was learning was the wrong one.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

— Curtis Sittenfeld

174. “One of the surprises of adulthood has been that, as the years pass, it has become less rather than more clear to me whether I’m a good or bad person.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

175. “If I’ll never know how much this was my path because of fate and how much because I willed it, the question is less important than that I made it across. Now other women know they, too, can make it, and not because I or anyone else tells them. They know because they’ve seen it happen.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

176. “I’m not going to say the rule doesn’t exist, but it’s like Santa Claus. It’s only real if you believe in it.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

177. “Perhaps, as was often the case with human interactions, it meant nothing.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

178. “Isn’t the goal to live with out demons, not to expect them to go away?”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

179. “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.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld

180. “If this was all I ever got, it would be the best thing that had ever happened to me, and if this was all I ever got, I’d never stop wanting more of it.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld