“We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Children are nothing but a problem people create and then congratulate themselves on solving.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“you know what her punishment is for tormenting you way back when?" he said.
I looked at him.
He said, "her punishment is being her,”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would inform the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginning.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“My own preferences had little bearing on the outcome of events.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“She would say that we create our own reality-that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Our windows were open, and the radio had been playing continuously--not one but two Billy Joel songs had come on during our drive--and the air was dense with the humidity of a midwestern summer, weather that even then made me homesick, though it was hard to say for what. Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would unfold the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginning.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“I want to open myself up, I want to experience other dimensions, I don’t want to be bound by the rules of this world. Does that make me a freak?”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Maybe I have always been, as Vi would subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself than looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Rudolph Walsh, you are my fierce advocate, and your wit and wisdom”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“we create our own reality—that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
Curtis Sittenfeld
Born place: in Cincinnati, The United States
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“Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside.
Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried.
'This is embarrassing,' I admitted.
'It doesn't have to be.'
'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said.
The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter.
In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family.
I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-coloured foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness like a great star of snow. It was the single living being that somewhat enlivened the lonely landscape.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
“When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration. With complex devices and commercial and industrial processes, the resulting difficulties can lead to accidents, injuries, and even deaths. It is time to reverse the situation: to cast the blame upon the machines and their design. It is the machine and its design that are at fault. It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)
“Looking back on it, could there possible have been a more confusing acronym for trying to keep kids from experimenting with drugs than DARE?
"Kids, we’re here today to DARE you not to do drugs! We DARE you to accept our DARE!"
"Office, does that mean you want us not to do drugs, or to do drugs?"
“We DARE you not to do drugs!”
"But I thought we weren’t supposed to do things We’re dared to do. If you dared me to jump out of a tree, I should do that, right?"
"It’s just an acronym, son."
"What is an acronym?”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories
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The Eye of the World
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