259 Quotes by Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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.

All things being equal, why not be married to a rich man? (Somewhere, Hannah thinks, there must be a needlepoint pillow asking this very question in a cleverer way.)

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

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

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.

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.

We have to make mistakes, it's how we learn compassion for others.

..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.