Show Don't Tell Quotes

“I never assume that anyone I encounter shares my opinion about anything.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“In all seriousness, I think one of my problems at Ault was that I tried too hard to learn lessons. I didn't recognize how much of the time life is just random. And often the lesson I thought I was learning was the wrong one.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“One of the surprises of adulthood has been that, as the years pass, it has become less rather than more clear to me whether I’m a good or bad person.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“Thirty-three and a half years on, I still didn’t quite understand why Martha was so fond of me at the same time that she made me feel like a stock she’d bought low. Another part of my life at Ault and my life later that I found difficult to reconcile was that I’d felt profoundly socially inept there and yet it turned out in the years afterward I was not only socially competent but in many cases I was more than competent—I was sometimes charming!—and also that my competence was probably built on my adolescent ineptitude. To win people over, as I’d learned as a teenager by doing the opposite, you just had to be easygoing and mostly upbeat, to not complain (unless wittily), to not overly care or reveal, to roll with where a conversation went. It was helpful to ask questions but not intrusive or meaningful ones. It also was helpful to know when to stop asking questions.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“But I’d failed to anticipate how calamitous the standard erosion of affection over time could be when you started with a modicum as opposed to an abundance.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“To be clear, I'm mocking neither my readers nor myself here - it took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“This may have been the single biggest difference between my teenage self and my middle-aged self: that I'd once been roiling with thoughts and opinions and yearnings that I suspected were strange or shameful or simply inexpressible, and therefore didn't express them. As I got older, it wasn't the thoughts and opinions and yearnings that went away; only, over time, their suppression.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“At some point, every man she dated looked at her like this; eventually, by being herself, she spooked them all.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“As you make your way through the world, you will feel bewildered, appalled, and charmed by other people.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“The cirsumstances that distress you and the circumstances that distress someone else might not overlap in the slightest.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“Even if it takes a month to get through a novel, the ritual still anchors me, the access to lives I’ll never live.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“I think you get to make your own choices,” I said. “And believe it or not, people in Michigan get Botox, too. I’m not shocked.” “But you never would, would you?” It was hard to explain why I wouldn’t. It wasn’t a lack of vanity. It was more that there was a way I understood myself that had felt entrapping in adolescence but liberating as I got older, a version of wherever you go, there you are. If I’d still be me with Botox, why bother with the Botox? “I probably wouldn’t,” I said, “but I’m a huge hypocrite in other ways. Isn’t the best any of us can hope for to be endearingly hypocritical?”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell