"I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)

"The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can't or won't treat you as well as you're accustomed."
— Curtis Sittenfeld

"'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; it did happen."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"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?"
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)

"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."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams: A Novel)

"To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"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 before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"I did not care if Ella went t 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 pulled on when you thought conditions called for it, but rather a constant way of existing in the world, knowing that good luck and bad luck touched everyone and none of us was fully responsible for our fortunes or tragedies. Above all, I wanted my daughter to understand that many people were guided by bitterness and that it was best to avoid these individuals - their moods and behavior were a hornet's nest you had no possible reason to do anything other than bypass and ignore."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"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."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)

"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."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"She nodded, jotting something in her notebook.
“You’re writing that down? Has the interview started?”
“Lee, whenever you’re talking to a reporter, you’re being interviewed.”"
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"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."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"... nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

""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 wasn't even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he'd somehow been mislead and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards.""
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

" "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.""
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite."
— Curtis Sittenfeld

"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 think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"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 (Prep: A Novel)

"I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

""And it wasn't that you couldn't be friends with a married woman, but you weren't friends in the same way, she didn't have the same freedom i her schedule, especially not after she had children, and even before that, she didn't need you; you needed friendship, and friendship to her was auxiliary, extra.""
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"But the truth was that I didn't want to stay in Riley. The pulls of familial love and obligation could not, for the moment, compete with the promise of early-relationship sex. Starlight and beer and our twisting, naked bodies--that was what I wanted, not a seat at a dining room table with two old women eating breaded veal cutlets and Vienna torte."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"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 breathe, there is a realness of place. The seasons are extreme, but they pass and return, pass and return, and the world seems far steadier than it does from the vantage point of a coastal city.

Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can't shake the sense that they're too picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard...and a beauty that I can't help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"By the time we met up again, she'd be able to hand her reaction to me as a tidy package: a single square of lasagna in a sealed Tupperware container as opposed to a squalid kitchen with tomato sauce splattered on the counters. And I wouldn't have to be there while she got it in order."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)

"’Sophie and I are never getting married in a million years,’ Cross said. He set his spoon on the table, lifted the glass, and tilted it back, and as I watched the milkshake tumble into his mouth, I felt that affection you feel for boys when you see one of the ways they’re different from you that’s not a bad way."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"I couldn’t tell them about Cross, I thought. I couldn’t tell them because Dede liked him and because she wouldn’t believe or understand it, and I couldn’t tell them because I myself was unsure what there was to believe or understand. It wasn’t like he’d kissed me, or made any declarations. What could I claim? For years and years, I felt this way, not just about Cross but about other guys – if they didn’t kiss you, it didn’t mean anything. Their interest in you had been so negligible as, perhaps, to have all been in your head."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed – on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn’t have a game – and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn’t get would hardly make a difference, and then what was there? The loathsomely familiar room where you lived, your horrible face and body, and the rebuke of other people, how they were unbothered, how you would seem, if you tried to explain, kind of weird and kind of boring and not even original. Why did their lives proceed so easily? Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around? Not, of course, that you would actually succeed if you tried."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"I enjoyed making them, and if it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"I noticed then that the red-haired woman was buying the food you eat when you live alone: a box of cereal, a few apples, a plastic container of plain yogurt....With an abrupt clarity, I saw how I had been launched into another category. I had been the red-haired woman; for a decade of my adult life, I had bought cereal and yogurt, I'd stood near couples and watched them nuzzle, and now I was part of such a couple. And I would not be launched back, I was certain. But I recognized her life, I knew it so well! I wanted to clasp her freckled hand, to say to her--surely we understood some shared code (or surely not, surely she'd have thought me preposterous)--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."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

""Well--" My mother paused, and her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is sad. "What I remember," she said, "is that you were always such a dear little girl.""
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"His ambitions exceed his talent."
— Curtis Sittenfeld

"There then occurred the first and only paranormal incident of my marriage. Charlie shifted in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked at me and, without preamble, said, “You have to forgive yourself for killing that boy.” . . . “For your own sake but for mine, too,” he was saying, and his voice was hoarse from sleep yet also certain and insistent. “If you don’t forgive yourself, you’re making that accident too important, you’re making him too important.” Charlie paused. “And I want to be the love of your life.” "
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

""There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.""
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"Once I had asked, ‘But are you a Democrat or a Republican?” and Jonathan said, “I’m socially progressive but fiscally conservative,” and Doug Miles, a football player who also came to Sunday breakfast but only ever read the sports section and ignored everyone, lifted his head and said, “Is that like being bisexual?” Which I actually thought was funny, even though I was pretty sure Doug was a jerk."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"After I’d told her – the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair – she said, ‘Did he kiss you?’
‘John and Martin totally would have seen that,’ I said, and as I felt myself implying the circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people – for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling.
"
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"’All right. Well, thanks, Lee.’ He grinned, and I thought that he really did have the best smile in the world. Also, I thought, I had given him a first-rate haircut. How this had happened was beyond me.
He was turning again when I blurted out, ‘Actually –‘ and he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Tullis—‘
‘No, I know who you are. I just wanted to tell you, I know this was a long time ago, but I wanted to tell you that I thought when you played guitar in the talent show last year, that was really good.’
He was still smiling. I loved boys, I thought. All of them.
When he left, he waved the way he had before he’d exited the stage after singing ‘Fire and Rain.
"
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"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, and on top of that I didn't take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn't even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he's somehow been mislead and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep: A Novel)

"I enjoyed making them, and if it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids."
— Curtis Sittenfeld