Sarah Dessen Quotes

447 Sourced Quotes

Okay. Enough." I got out of the closet, brushing myself off, then turned around to face her. "This is happening. So you need to go downstairs, face your fears, and make the best of it, and everything will be okay." She narrowed her eyes at me. "When did you suddenly become so positive?" "Just get out of there.

Sarah Dessen
It's okay to accept things from people. It doesn't make you weak or helpless.

Sarah Dessen
Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

Sarah Dessen
As I stepped out to face myself in the mirror, reaching a hand to smooth away the steam, I saw myself differently. It was as if I had grown again as I slept, but this time just to fit my own size. As if my soul had expanded, filling out the gaps of the height that had burdened me all these months. Like a balloon filling slowly with air, becoming all smooth and buoyant, I felt like I finally fit within myself, edge to edge, every crevice filled.

Sarah Dessen
Despite our differences, we did have a history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did.

Sarah Dessen
Wake up, Caitlin, Mr. Lensing had said. But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away.

Sarah Dessen
Yes, it sucked getting dumped. But wasn't it better to just be brutally honest? To admit that your feeling for someone is never going to be powerful enough to justify taking up any more of their time? I was doing him a favor, really. Freeing him up for a better opportunity. In fact, I was a practically a saint, if you really thought about it. Exactly.

Sarah Dessen
It's a big deal when you finally get the chance to do the one thing you want to do -need to do- more than anything. It can kind of scare the crap out of you.

Sarah Dessen
There's something nice about the silence of a car ride in the dark, going home. When you were tired of the radio and conversation, and it was okay to just be alone with your thoughts and the road ahead. If you're that comfortable with someone, you don't have to talk.

Sarah Dessen
But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening.

Sarah Dessen
Welcome to adulthood," she said. "It sucks as much as high school.

Sarah Dessen
Everything, in the end, comes down to timing. One second, one minute, one hour could make all the difference.

Sarah Dessen
Maybe, you just misplaced it, you know? It's been there. But you just haven't been looking in the right spot. Because lost means forever, it's gone. But misplaced... that means it's still around, somewhere. Just not where you thought.

Sarah Dessen
One word," Ted replied, dead serious, "can change the whole world." There was a moment while we all considered this. Finally Lissa said to Chloe, loud enough for all of us to hear (she'd had a minibottle or two herself), "I bet he did really well on his SATs.

Sarah Dessen
But I'd long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren't guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a good-bye at all.

Sarah Dessen
Again, it occurred to me how weird it was to be permanent in a place that to everyone else was only temporary. Like I could never be sure if they were the ones who weren't real, or if I was.

Sarah Dessen
It's funny how someone's perception of you can be formed without you even knowing it.

Sarah Dessen
Morris was not the type to offer a hug or even hold your hand. But there was something in his quiet indignation at the universe then—and Luke, now—that was just the kind of comfort I needed. "I'm such a mess," I said. "We're almost off the island and I didn't even ask you where you were going." He shrugged. "No place. Wherever you are.

Sarah Dessen
When you've never gotten love from someone, you don't know what it might look like if it ever does appear. You look for it in everything: any bright light overhead could be a star.

Sarah Dessen
From up above, in a plane passing over, you'd just see one little light in all this dark, with no idea of the lives that were being lived within it, and in the house beside, and beside that one. So much happening in the world, night and day, hour by hour. It was no wonder we were meant to sleep, if only to check out of it for a little while.

Sarah Dessen
I paused, only just now realizing that the subject was hitting a little close to home. "You know, getting hurt. Putting herself out there, opening up to someone." Yeah," he said adding some cheese straws to the cart, "but risk is just part of relationships. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't." I picked up a box of cheese straws, examining it. "Yeah," I said. "But it's not all about chance, either.

Sarah Dessen
In those first few hours officially single again the world seems like it expands, suddenly bigger and more vast now that you have to get through it alone.

Sarah Dessen
Please. She sighed. 'Can't a girl have high standards? I don't want an ordinary boy.

Sarah Dessen
I reached up with my finger and traced the scar over my eyebrow, remembering when that was the greatest hurt I'd ever known.

Sarah Dessen
When you had to do something, you had to do it. And eventually, if you were lucky, you did it well.

Sarah Dessen
You need demarcation." "Demarcation?" I asked. "It means a clear separation between two things," he told me. "A solid end before a clean beginning. No murky borders. Clarity.

Sarah Dessen
Leaving was easy. It was everything else that was so damned hard.

Sarah Dessen
But anyone can begin. It was the part with all the promise, the potential, the things I loved. More and more, though, I was finding myself wanting to find out what happened in the end..

Sarah Dessen
I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second place finishes left behind.

Sarah Dessen
It was kind of soothing, these sounds of lives being lived all around me, for better or for worse. And there I was, in the middle of them all, newly reborn and still waiting for mine to begin.

Sarah Dessen