Prep Quotes

“I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.”
― 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

“Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“... nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“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

“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

“Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“... it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“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

“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

“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

“Ordinarily, of course, I thought it best to remain inconspicuous, but the gesture had a certain irresistable theatricaility, and an inevitablility. Sometimes you can feel the pull of what other people want from you, and you sacrifice yourself, you risk seeming odd or sunsavory, to keep them entertained.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“I actually liked the disolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were to ever kill myself, I thought it would be in the summer.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“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

“But I never thought of who he wasn't, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn't even care what we talked about.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“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

“I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“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

“You don't make waves unless there's a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that's it. You're a trouble make, and they never think of you any other way.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“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

“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