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

“How did I think for so long that the tidbits my mother shared didn’t contain lessons? I see in retrospect that they were nothing but lessons. As you make your way through the world, you will feel bewildered, appalled, and charmed by other people. In the real version of all our days, as opposed to the version we publicly present, there are many undignified moments. The circumstances that distress you and the circumstances that distress someone else might not overlap in the slightest. In situations that make you nervous, do your best and proceed; others before you have also been nervous.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

“Also, I'd learned that while it was hard and rare to truly connect with anyone, sometimes men were attracted to me. I'd accepted this the way other people seemed to accept the existence of a god - rather than asking why or searching for evidence, I tried to simply take reassurance and comfort in the unexpected glimmers indicating that it was so.”
― 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