I'm on a Sittenfeld kick lately. I'll get into that more on the book blog...but here are some quotes that encourage my current addiction to her work:
"Do people really live so peacefully and treat each other so kindly? It's impressive, and yet their lives must lack direction and purpose. At home, she knows her purpose. Whenever her father is in the house -- in the morning before he goes to the office, after work, on the weekends -- his mood dictates what they can talk about, or if they can talk at all, or which rooms they can enter. To live with a person who might at any moment spin out of control makes everything so clear: Your goal is to not instigate, and if you are successful, avoidance is its own reward. The things other people want, what they chase after and think they're entitled to -- possessions, or entertainment or say, fairness - who cares? These are extraneous. All you are trying to do is prolong the periods between outbursts or, if this proves impossible, to conceal these outbursts from the rest of the world," p24
"Far in the future, Hannah will have a boyfriend named Mike with whom she'll talk about her father. She'll say she isn't sorry about her upbringing before the divorce, that she thinks in a lot of ways it was useful. Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which, in Hannah's observation, is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises, when they occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you live under the shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o'clock - these are enough. They are gifts," p35
"He is talking more slowly when he says, 'I know I only met you once before today, but you seem like you have your act together. You don't seem like you need rescuing,'
Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder," p84
"In their lives together, he'd recognize her as a member of his tribe: He wouldn't mistake her quietness for niceness, her sense of responsibility for humorlessness; he wouldn't even mistake her prudishness for real prudishness. He'd be boisterous and obnoxious, and he wouldn't think (Mike had thought this) that talking about other people was slightly immoral. She wouldn't feel the loneliness of being the only one who had opinions," p193
"But maybe this is what Hannah has always wanted: a man who will deny her. A man of her own who isn't hers. Isn't it the real reason she broke up with Mike - not because he moved to North Carolina for law school...but because he adored her? If she asked him to get out of bed and bring her a glass of water, he did. If she was in a bad mood, he tried to soothe her. It didn't bother him if she cried, or if she didn't wash her hair or shave her legs or have anything interesting to say. He forgave it all, he always thought she was beautiful, he always wanted to be around her. It became so boring! She'd been raised, after all, not to be accommodated but to accommodate, and if she was his world, then his world was small, he was easily satisfied...She wanted to feel like she was striding cleanly forward, walking into a bracing wind and learning from her mistakes...with Oliver, there is always contrast to shape their days, tension to keep them on their toes: You are far from me, you are close to me. We are fighting, we are getting along," p212
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