Show Don't Tell

by Curtis Sittenfeld

Graduate school was the part of my life when I had the most free time and the fewest obligations, when I discussed fiction the most and read it the least. But it was hard to focus when you were, like a pupa, in the process of becoming yourself.

the difference between who I was then and who I am now is that now I never assume that anyone I encounter shares my opinion about anything.

“Are you familiar with the narcissism of small differences?” “I can probably infer what it is, but no.” “Freud stole the concept from an English anthropologist named Ernest Crawley. It explains the infighting among groups whose members have far more in common than not.

Liberals/democrats/leftists

there aren’t enough hours in the day to tell you all the things I need and don’t have.”

it took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.

There was a time when he would have asked How is it, then there was a time when he wouldn’t have asked but Heather still would have been surprised that he hadn’t, and now she’d be surprised if he did.

“This isn’t political. I just think you’d all be more comfortable in the other room.”

Jill considered pointing out that, as problematicness went, until the previous year, Amy had referred to the Black students who were bused to Hardale East Elementary School as “deseg kids,” as in desegregation.

in my capacity as a fairly dull person, I thought I’d been sharing one of my few genuinely interesting tidbits.

“Because there’s often a gap between the people we aspire to be and the people we are,” I said.

“It was profound. It helped me remember that anyone who gets to old age is lucky.”

Some handled “family investments,” and maybe this was a real thing, but it had always sounded to me like getting paid to count your own money.

Even then, at fifteen, I knew this wasn’t an original sentiment.

Men will say something they think is profound but it was just a thought I had when I was 12

felt around in the dark for a bag of pretzels I’d stuck in my bag at the Detroit airport and tried to eat them as quietly as possible.

DETROIT IS NOT IN CENTRAL TIMEEEEEEE