The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.
Interpretation
Life's significant moments often seem trivial at the time they happen.
In her quote, Curtis Sittenfeld reflects on how the most important events in life often go unnoticed in the moment because they do not match our expectations of what such moments should feel like. We are often distracted by mundane concerns, and when looking back, we realize that those seemingly small instances were actually profound experiences that shaped our lives.
In practice
In a graduation speech highlighting the importance of seemingly small moments in the journey of education.
She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they're a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.
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.
My life will be the best illustration of all my work.
In life you have a choice: Bitter or Better? Choose better, forget bitter.
(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.
This is the strangest life I've ever known.
That larger story in 'Salvage the Bones' is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters' experiences that make their stories universal stories.
If you want the beautiful moments to shine, you have to contrast that with dark and gruesome moments. That's the way life is.
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