Sarah Dessen Quotes

447 Sourced Quotes

No matter how much time has passed, these things still affect us and the world we live in. If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together.

Sarah Dessen
Can she be divorced?" I asked. "And famous for her commercials and ideas?" She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.

Sarah Dessen
It was like when you're a little kid and you run into your teacher or librarian at the grocery store or Wal-mart and it's just so startling, because it never occurred to you they existed outside of school.

Sarah Dessen
But it was okay not to fit in everywhere, as long as you did somewhere.

Sarah Dessen
How weird that must be, to stay the same as everyone else changes.

Sarah Dessen
All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.

Sarah Dessen
The worst part was that I had things I wanted to tell my mother, too many to count, but none of them would go down so easy. She'd been through too much, between my siters-I could not add to the weight. So instead, I did my best to balance it out, bit by bit, word by word, story by story, even if none of them were true.

Sarah Dessen
Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.

Sarah Dessen
You can never be sure of anyone until you're close enough to see them clearly.

Sarah Dessen
She was just a shell of her former self, functioning and talking but hardly alive.

Sarah Dessen
So," she went on, "it got me thinking about what cost beauty. Or for that matter, what cost anything? Would you trade love for beauty? Or happiness for beauty? Could a gorgeous person with a mean streak be a worthy trade? And if you did make the trade, decide you'd take that beautiful swan and hope it wouldn't turn on you, what would you do if it did?

Sarah Dessen
And I felt a sudden whirl in my head, knowing this leap was inevitable, that I wasn't just standing on the cliff, toes poking over, but already in mid-air.

Sarah Dessen
Why don't you ever wait a second and see what I'm planning, or thinking, before you burst in with your opinions and ideas? You never even give me a chance.

Sarah Dessen
This was our common ground, the secret we shared but never spoke aloud. I should have been with him; she should have left him alone. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense.

Sarah Dessen
If you didn't love him, this never would have happened. But you did. And accepting that love and everything that followed it is part of letting it go.

Sarah Dessen
It was like discovering that some part of you wasn't yours at all. And it made me wonder what else I couldn't claim.

Sarah Dessen
I was worn out, broken: He had taken almost everything. But he'd been all I'd had, all this time. And when the police led him away, I pulled out of the hands of all these loved one, sobbing, screaming, everything hurting, to try and make him stay.

Sarah Dessen
There's just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise.

Sarah Dessen
This was always the problem with my mother and me, I suddenly realized. There were so many things we thought we agreed on, but anythign can have two meanings. Like sides of a coin, it just matters how it falls.

Sarah Dessen
Because the truth sometimes hurts," I said. Yeah," he said. "So do lies, though.

Sarah Dessen
The worst thing you can do if you miss or need someone is let them know it.

Sarah Dessen
It was like those songs I'd heard as a child, each so familiar, and all mine. When i got older and realized the words were sad, the stories tragic, it didn't make me love them any less. By then they were already part of me, woven into my conciousness & memory

Sarah Dessen
Everything always gets crazy at the end. You just have to keep going, regardless of how awful it gets. So that's what I do.

Sarah Dessen
But something, somehow, had made all these paths converge. You couldn't find it on a checklist, or work it into the equation. It just happened.

Sarah Dessen
Call it crazy, or just chicken salad. But within reason, or without it i was in it too.

Sarah Dessen
We can't expect everybody to be there for us, all at once. So it's a lucky thing that really, all you need is someone.

Sarah Dessen
This is what daughters did. They left, and came home later with lives of their own.

Sarah Dessen
It was as familiar to me as a song I'd been hearing my whole life, covered by various people but the basic tune the same.

Sarah Dessen
The further you go, the more you have to be proud of. At the same time, in order to come a long way, you have to be behind to begin with. IN the end, though maybe it's not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all.

Sarah Dessen
For two hours I'd felt myself stretching tighter and tighter, like a rubber band pulled to the point of snapping. And now, I could feel the smaller, weaker part of myself beginning to fray, tiny bits giving way before the big break.

Sarah Dessen