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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
Destruction
Capacity
Realizing
Family
Always
Bystander
Never
Bystanders
Inflict
Possessed

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I've had people say very dismissive things about my books, but I also feel like I probably have more readers because I'm a woman. I mean, more readers are women and more people who buy books are women, so I don't feel like it's a total disadvantage to be a female writer.
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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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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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I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, I need a little more psychological realism.
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It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man
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I'm SO trying to give up meat.
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If you’re a parent in 2013, you have to get your hands on this book. Wise, engrossing, and so real that I fear Senior has been spying inside my house, All Joy is a must-read for those of us whose lives have been enriched and derailed by having kids.
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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.
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We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.
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If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.
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I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that's exciting.
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Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.
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I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn't want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?
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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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My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
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To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
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I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.
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Of course, I didn't imagine then that I could have had a real relationship with any guy. I thought that by virtue of being me I was disqualified.
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The best part of being a writer for me is immersing myself in a fictional world, which is the opposite of being on social media. At the same time, if no one ever read my work, if I was writing solely for myself, I bet it would be lonely and a lot less fun.
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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