Rodham Quotes

“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life is this: Do not preemptively take no for an answer. Do not decide your request has been rejected before it officially has. As with so many other lessons that involve assertion, this one applies far more to women than men.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“You know when true equality will be achieved? When a woman with...skeletons in her closet has the nerve to run for office.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“Something inside me clenched. So often, people let you down; so often, situations turn out disappointingly. But occasionally someone recognizes, acknowledges, your private and truest self.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“Some people who run for office want to create change, and some want everyone to fall in love with them.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“In my youth, I had respected my father’s intelligence, not recognizing how much sharper my mother’s was because hers was concealed by being pleasant and female.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“The margin between staying and leaving was so thin; really, it could have gone either way.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“And I want a woman in that seat. Whether it’s Alan Dixon or Joe Biden or George Bush, I’m so tired of these idiot men getting to make up the rules for the rest of us. They’re not smarter. They’re not nicer. They don’t have better judgment. They’re just men.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“And really, wasn’t this endless ruminating over my own likability in itself a thing only a woman would do? Did Bill—or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul—ever ponder their likability, or did they simply go after what they wanted? Did Bill ever stop to think about which of us was more qualified, did he question his own motives for entry into the race? The idea was laughable.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“A lesson I learned from Bill, a lesson that perhaps should be obvious, though there’s evidence that most other people don’t know it, either, is that direct and sincere compliments are shockingly effective—that they feel wonderful. What in theory should sound saccharine or manipulative rarely does in practice, so long as you believe the other person really means it. And we crave praise not, I think, because most of us are egomaniacal. It’s because we’re human.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“I liked being around other people during the day, and I was relieved to be alone late at night; it was the latter that made the former possible. In fact, setting up my nest often made me think of a Wordsworth phrase I’d learned in English class as a high school junior: emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“have you heard the sex party rumor?” She winced and said, “It actually does sound familiar.” I had the impulse to shake my head, but I didn’t want to mess up Veronica’s handiwork. I said, “You know when true equality will be achieved? When a woman with these kinds of skeletons in her closet has the nerve to run for office.” 2004”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“If I’ll never know how much this was my path because of fate and how much because I willed it, the question is less important than that I made it across. Now other women know they, too, can make it, and not because I or anyone else tells them. They know because they’ve seen it happen.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“You will encounter boys and men with whom you think you enjoy chemistry. A boy or man will find you funny and interesting and smart, just as you find him funny and interesting and smart. The pleasure you take in each other's company will be obvious, but, crucially, while this pleasure will make you feel as if you're in love with him, it will not make him feel as if he's in love with you. He might remark on how much he likes talking to you, but there will be girls he wants to kiss, and you will not be one of them.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“There was a feeling I got before I spoke in front of an audience and sometimes also before an event that was less public but still important, an event that could have consequences in my life - taking the LSATs, for example, which I'd done in a classroom on the campus of Harvard. The feeling was a focused kind of anticipation, it was like a weight inside my chest, but it never exactly came from being nervous. I always had prepared, and I always knew I could do it. Thus the feeling was a sense of my competence blended with the knowledge that I was about to pull off a feat most people thought, correctly or not, they couldn't. And this knowledge contributed to the final aspect of the feeling, which was loneliness - the loneliness of being good at something.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“There were so many of us who wanted this, and we wanted it so badly. I’d been asked countless times why I was running for president, and I’d answered countless times, seemingly never to anyone’s satisfaction. I think the problem was that journalists and voters were asking an individual question that had a collective answer. I did want to help people, and I wanted to help as many people as possible. I did like the work of holding elected office, and I liked doing things I was good at, and I liked being recognized for doing things I was good at. But as much as I wanted to be president, I wanted a woman to be president—I wanted this because women and girls were half the population and we deserved, as a basic human right and a means of ensuring justice, to be equally represented in our government.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“Sometimes I think I’ve made so few mistakes that the public can remember all of them, in contrast to certain male politicians whose multitude of gaffes and transgressions gets jumbled in the collective imagination, either negated by one another or forgotten in the onslaught.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“Maybe life isn’t about the absence of embarrassment, it’s about the mastery of embarrassment.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“There are two kinds of marriages: the ones where you're privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you're not.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“In their articles and on the air, political journalists loved including local color (meat on a stick at the state fair, polka bands, caucuses held in a gun shop or grain elevator) in inverse proportions to how much they'd disdain such spectacles in their actual lives, off the job. A reporter had once told me that if she was getting dinner on her own on the road, she would choose a restaurant by googling the zip code and kale salad.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“the things that made me most myself were a romantic turnoff, that no one would simultaneously value my intellect and find me attractive; I had wanted so badly to be wrong, and I’d struggled to find evidence that I was.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“Autocorrect can happen to anyone, but I seriously don’t understand what goes on between him and his phone.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“I was me, Hillary, but I also was a vessel and a proxy.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“But I always hoped a man would fall in love with me for my brain.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“I thought of this arrangement of tea, pillows, notebook, calendar, and textbooks as my nest.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“The sun setting over the water became almost unbearably beautiful.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“I know what you mean,” said Diwata. “But, like, post-Obama? He’s just, you know—” She trailed off, and I raised my eyebrows. “Pale, male, and stale?” she said. Diwata herself was biracial, the daughter of a black father and a Filipina American mother.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“Surely, if he was elected, some form of exposure therapy would occur in which I began to perceive him as the national leader rather than my ex-boyfriend”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“Didn’t Mark Twain say something about courage being the mastery of fear rather than the absence of fear?”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“The subject of baseball came up—I was an ardent Cubs fan, despite their terrible record that year—and I said, “Even if the White Sox are having a better season, Ernie Banks is clearly the best player on either team. If the Cubs build around him, they’ll be good in time.” Maureen’s father smiled unpleasantly from across the table. He said, “You’re awfully opinionated for a girl.” It was not the first time someone had said such a thing. Starting when I was in third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Jauss, had routinely asked me to be in charge when she left the room, a task that sometimes necessitated my telling John Rasch to sit down or stop poking Donna Zinser and resulted in John reminding me that I wasn’t a teacher. In fourth grade, I’d been elected co-captain of the safety patrol, which occasionally elicited similar resistance from my peers. But Mr. Gurski’s remark was the sentiment’s clearest and most succinct expression in my life thus far and gave me, henceforth, a kind of shorthand understanding of the irritation and resentment I provoked in others. Not all others, of course—plenty of people admired that I was eager and responsible—but among those provoked were both men and women, adults and children.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“I’d been constipated or spilled coffee on my pants. Sometimes I think I’ve made so few mistakes that the public can remember all of them, in contrast to certain male politicians whose multitude of gaffes and transgressions gets jumbled in the collective imagination, either negated by one another or forgotten in the onslaught. The less you screw up, the more clearly the public keeps track of each error.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham