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be17b64
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Good manners means accommodating the person you were with.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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9d228ce
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It is not a camera, or a reporter, that makes something, real and genuine; more often, a camera or a reporter does the opposite.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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cd86ccf
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They only half-jokingly speculated about whether they were the last two single people from their high school class,
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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52ad412
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My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn't.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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f1ce0db
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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, so long as he devotes himself to you in return.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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b537ade
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It's good on the other side, but it's good on your side too. Enjoy it there. The loneliness is harder, and the loneliness is the biggest part, but some things are easier.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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62e3bfe
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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 to subjects they profess to find repugnant
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curtis sittenfeld |
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25e5de2
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Jane resembled nothing so much as a pregnant angel. She
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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8e65edd
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Long ago I had become my own confidant.
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curtis sittenfeld |
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6f2a17f
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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."
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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96073a5
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though as secrets went, this wasn't great. The kind I preferred were about specific people.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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47a87ef
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When you are the object of a person's affection, do you naturally credit him with a sympathetic heart and an understanding of the world? Perhaps your impression is right only insofar as it applies to you; in his presence, he is indeed possessed of these qualities for the very reason that you are the object of his affection. He is not observant so much as observant of you, not kind so much as kind toward you.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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82b1746
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At such moments, I felt that we were like the people in California who live in enormous houses on the sides of cliffs, ghat our lives were beautiful but precarious, their foundations vulnerable.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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ee23386
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Though Chip's tears during the exchange of vows weren't a surprise, their duration and magnitude was a spectacle unlike any Liz had ever witnessed.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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1000c30
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When they left the bar, before parting ways in Port Authority, they stood on the corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue and continued talking; there were between them always an infinite number of subjects to be addressed and dissected, mulled over and mocked and revised.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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660a9f6
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Even our challenges here have made our lives richer and deepened our ability to feel. Our family has been very lucky to live somewhere beautiful.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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b757cc5
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About a year before, Kitty and Lydia had embraced CrossFit, the intense strength and conditioning regimen that involved weight lifting, kettle bells, battle ropes, obscure acronyms, the eschewal of most foods other than meat, and a derisive attitude toward the weak and unenlightened masses who still believed that jogging was a sufficient workout and a bagel was an acceptable breakfast.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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761db34
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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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love
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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b45fed7
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But still, Liz was unwilling to grant them access to her new and wondrous romance; she loved Darcy too much to prove her love to anyone except him.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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77f2c7c
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She came down to my dorm that night, knocking on the door around nine o'clock. Martha was at the library, and I was eating graham crackers and reading 'Glamour'. She didn't wait for me to open the door but turned the knob herself and stepped inside. Seeing her in the threshold was both surprising and perfectly natural - since I'd left her classroom, my head had been pretty much continuously buzzing with pieces of my conversation, and her pr..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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9ec703d
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She came down to my dorm that night, knocking on the door around nine o'clock. Martha was at the library, and I was eating graham crackers and reading 'Glamour'. She didn't wait for me to open the door but turned the knob herself and stepped inside. Seeing her in the threshold was both surprising and perfectly natural - since I'd left her classroom, my head had been pretty much continuously buzzing with pieces of my conversation, and her pr..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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65fc0b7
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I won't claim I've never in my life done anything I'm ashamed of, but I haven't done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I've made, that's fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.
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shame
what-others-think
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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e4098d5
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You never know the nature of another couple's marriage, do you?
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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a082188
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you certainly should
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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842ac5b
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People recognized you or they didn't, and it was unrelated to knowing you. Knowing you could just be your name or the street you lived on, your father's job. Recognizing you was understanding you had thoughts in your head, finding the same things funny or excruciating, remembering what you'd said months or even years after you'd said
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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a4e165a
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Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library- this was when I walked down the aisle and he was waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, every reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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47c33cc
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Her prettiness was factual and obvious, the way a flag was patriotic or a puppy was cute--not an interesting prettiness, but also not contingent on taste.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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f190a66
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get more stupider.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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e2db481
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The Wisconsin land, scraped and rearranged by glaciers, accosted by tornadoes, drenched and dried out and drenched again--it didn't care what I had done.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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31313d0
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we create our own reality--that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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24007b5
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as a single woman in my early thirties, I was careful not to coo excessively over other people's infants, lest it seem like I was telegraphing my desperation; the necessity of this precaution annoyed me, making me want to defiantly announce that I'd always liked babies,
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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50996c1
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Coordinating the calendars of five men in their forties is like herding cats.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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66e66b2
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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.
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moving-away
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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8359f2c
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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 mat..
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relationships
romance
sexuality
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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46bd48e
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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.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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397964a
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Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber- I suspected both. If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you're one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second ..
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academics
classes
college
dumb
intelligence
school
struggle
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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16b8a80
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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.
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depression
dorm-life
dorm-room
lonliness
sadness
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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867aa90
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I often messed up with people, it was true, but it rarely happened because I was reading them wrong; it was because I got nervous, or because I could see too clearly that I was not what they wanted. And, in fact, it was in falling short that I truly excelled.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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0395cbb
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Dispatches and warnings from this side of the fame fence tend to go ignored, dismissed as either whining or false modesty; if they weren't ignored, if people listened, no one would ever again seek attention. But they always do, they strive and strive, hoping one day they, too, will have the luxury of lamenting their high profile.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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ffed549
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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 ever running out of things to say.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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0af7415
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I've never tried to assert my views unless they are self-evident, not reliant on an argument from me to prove or disprove them: Breast-cancer awareness and AIDS prevention are good. Illiteracy is bad. Historic preservation will allow future generations to understand what life used to be like and in so doing will help Americans chart a path forward. The issues and decisions that are more complex I have left to others, to those confident of t..
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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12c2cb6
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People to whom a terrible thing has never happened trust fate, the notion that what's meant to be, will be. The rest of us know better.
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life-quotes
trauma
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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78a3a4e
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Sure, I believed the worst of myself but - not really. I was always waiting to be proven wrong.
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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5c5dc00
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reason to do anything other than bypass and ignore. And
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Curtis Sittenfeld |