Sarah Dessen Quotes

Once I turned eighteen, I could cut myself off from everyone and finally get what I wanted, which was to be on my own, once and for all. ~Ruby, pg 38

“In Truth,” I said, “there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.” “How do you win?” he asked. “That,” I said, “is such a boy question.

Rogerson," I asked him sweetly as we sat watching a video in the pool house, "where would I find the pelagic zone?" "In the open sea," he said. "Now shut up and eat your Junior Mints.

I was born in 1970 in Illinois, but all the life I remember I've spent in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Change is inevitable, though," he replied. "As is disappointment. Best to get used to it now.

Harder to get in than out, like so little else.

Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.

He just stood there, looking at me, as if I had actually changed before his eyes. But this was the girl I'd been all along. I'd just hidden her well.

Say what you will, but you’re never prepared for the surprise attack.

So he didn't have to prove how he felt about me. Like so much else, I should just know.

He always did the leaving. But not this time. She kept walking, and did not look back.

I'm starting to think, though, that some things never get that. The replay, and all. So at some point you have to make peace with it as it is, not keep waiting for a chance to change it

When you have a kid, you sign on for the whole package: good, bad, everything in between. you can't just dip in and out, picking and choosing the parts you want and quitting when it's not perfect.

Looking back, it seemed like it should have been harder to lose someone, or have them lose you, especially when they were in the same state, only a few towns over.

With my mom, when someone was gone, they were gone. She didn't waste another minute thinking about them, and neither should you.

Only a weak person needed someone else around all the time.

Never would forever, with all its meanings, be so clear and distinct as in the true, guaranteed end of the world.

Instead, we just sat there, together but really apart, watching a show about a stranger and all her secrets, while keeping our own to ourselves, as always.

"I just don't know," I said, my voice sounding bumby, not like mine, "how do you help someone who doesn't want your help. What do you do when you can't do anything?"

I don't lie." "You don't lie," I repeated. "That's what I said." "Ever." "Nope." Sure you don't, I thought.

Nate: “And,” he said, “boys at twelve aren’t exactly slick with the ladies.” Ruby: “’Slick with the ladies’?” I said. “Are you twelve?

I understood now. This voice, the one that had been trying to get my attention all this time, calling out to me, begging me to hear it - it wasn't Will's. It was mine.

It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.

I thought again how you could never really know what you were seeing with just a glance, in motion, passing by. Good or bad, right or wrong. There was always so much more.

So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.

All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear. And if you're lucky, there's someone close enough by to shoulder the rest.

We were willing to do so much for the people we loved, even if it meant hurting ourselves. Maybe that, in the end, was what love- all kinds- was really about.

Right now, though, I wanted not to think forward or backward, but only to lose myself in the words.

If this was my forever, I wouldn't want to spend it here.

So while it seemed like you were seeing everything, you really weren't. Just bits and pieces that looked like a whole.

And for one second, it was like I could feel the timing clicking together, finally pieces falling into place.

Wes wants to be with Macy. And Macy, whether she'll admit it or not, wants to be with Wes. And yet they're not together, which is not only unjust, but when you think about it, tragical!

Donneven, Bettaquit and Mmmhmmmm

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

The end of a wedding reception is always so depressing. And only the bride and groom are spared, jetting off into the sunset while the rest of us wake up the next morning to just another day.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense.

Remy: Did you really believe, that first day, that we were meant to be together? Dexter: You're here, aren't you?

Then what are you like, Annabel?" he shot back. "A liar, like you told me that first day? Come on. That was the biggest lie of all.

See, Colie, it's all about understanding. We're all worth something.

Their words, like the music, had the potential to be endless.

If there's one thing I've learned in the last few months, it's that sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.

During this time we've been apart, it's you I've thought of when I'm at my weakest, and you who have pulled me through.

I felt like I'd been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn't there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.

So I left him there alone to watch history repeat the same events retold again and again on his own.

She took the sun when it came and the rain the same way.

I couldn't tell her. I couldn't tell anyone. As long as I didn't say it aloud, it wasn't real.

Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together.

It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again.

Because it is so hard, in any life, to believe in what you can’t fully understand.

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.