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She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

Curtis Sittenfeld

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Curtis Sittenfeld
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: August 23
Author
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld
Elizabeth Sittenfeld
Possessed
Destruction
Capacity
Realizing
Family
Always
Bystander
Never
Bystanders
Inflict

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I don't know what it is about human beings but most of us really like reading about or observing sexual tension and romance. It's just so much fun. I don't know if there is some Darwinian thing in us that really responds to that, but I think the most memorable scenes to me in books and movies are the ones where a couple is about to kiss.
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I feel like as I've gotten older I've unfortunately come to the decision that a lot of people who seem normal and boring maybe are normal and boring.
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I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites? She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You're sixteen. How can you already be a Republican?
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Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.
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And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.
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Obviously the bar is much higher now for a behavior to be scandalous. Social media has really changed the way people live. It's not a new impulse it's just being enacted in a new way.
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In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
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There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.
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I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.
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You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.
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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.
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Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.
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I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.
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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.
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I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating
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When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.
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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.
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I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
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Of course a magazine is usually more interesting than a conversation, because so much more time and preparation has gone into it.
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I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.
Curtis Sittenfeld