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bff9644
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I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.
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blending-in
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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9688228
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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c0b8e26
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Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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7d2017a
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We have to make mistakes, it's how we learn compassion for others.
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understanding
mistakes
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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71dafbb
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The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that;..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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d13a223
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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dde98be
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nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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e55a6c8
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I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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fb15b10
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To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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1faaaa4
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Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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d617a34
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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d1415ef
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Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me - that I'd so rarely resisted, that I hadn't made it hard enough for him. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily - it wasn't locked at all - and you're standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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bfbb3cf
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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?
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taking-chances
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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5b2d807
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I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will--that is the part that's almost unbearable.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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b8d61d9
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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226cb6b
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And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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d5340c9
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The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn't romantic, but I wasn't sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people's time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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c96ba43
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To think of the Midwest as a whole as anything other than beautiful is to ignore the extraordinary power of the land. The lushness of the grass and trees in August, the roll of the hills (far less of the Midwest is flat than outsiders seem to imagine), the rich smell of soil, the evening sunlight over a field of wheat, or the crickets chirping at dusk on a residential street: All of it, it has always made me feel at peace. There is room to ..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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fed4f3c
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I did not care if Ella went to Princeton, if she was exceptionally pretty, if she grew up to marry a rich man, or really if she married at all - there were many incarnations of her I felt confident I could embrace, a hippie or a housewife or a career woman. But what I did care about, what I wanted most fervently, was for her to understand that hard work paid off, that decency begat decency, that humility was not a raincoat you occasionally ..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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8a73161
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This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, and he wouldn't be entirely wrong - nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was always any of those thing, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn't pretty, and on top of that I didn't take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I w..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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8dcdb72
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Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childho..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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b14e1fc
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We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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362d420
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What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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2a17f39
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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8ea140c
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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2504c74
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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20c5dfd
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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cbcc2dc
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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610d2b0
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it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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cb829ee
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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4a1537a
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There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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35acb75
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Children are nothing but a problem people create and then congratulate themselves on solving.
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political-correctness
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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07c0cef
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Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left befor..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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1203bac
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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?
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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4285317
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We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn't dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I t..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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a402af6
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She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.
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family
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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84b937e
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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8b2c168
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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d97a2dc
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When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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287218d
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Ordinarily, of course, I thought it best to remain inconspicuous, but the gesture had a certain irresistable theatricaility, and an inevitablility. Sometimes you can feel the pull of what other people want from you, and you sacrifice yourself, you risk seeming odd or sunsavory, to keep them entertained.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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81e1dd0
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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?"
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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5871a83
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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.
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relationships
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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ccb77b1
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But maybe this is what Hannah has always wanted: a man who will deny her. A man of her own who isn't hers. Isn't it the real reason she broke up with Mike--not because he moved to North Carolina for law school (he wanted her to go with him, and she said no) but because he adored her? If she asked him to get out of bed and bring her a glass of water, he did. If she was in a bad mood, he tried to soothe her. It didn't bother him if she cried,..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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7086b96
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |