Sarah Dessen Quotes

It's a choice, Annabel. And if you make the wrong one, you have only yourself to blame when there are consequences.

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.

You want me to give her a key?" the guy asked. "I want you to give her a possibility," she told him, looking at my necklace again. "And that's what a key represents. An open door, a chance. You know?

Honesty in principle was one thing. In someone’s face, it was another.

I wondered again why the right thing always seemed to be met with so much resistance, when you'd think it would be the easier path. You had to fight to be virtuous.

This was our common ground, the secret we shared but never spoke aloud.

I was heading off to my new world. But I was taking a part of my past, and the future, along with me for the ride.

I'd been convinced I was on the outside, but really, I'd always been within arm's reach. All I had to do was ask, and I, too, would be easily brought back, surrounded and immersed, finding myself safe, somewhere in between.

The choices you make now, the people you surround yourself with, they all have the potential to affect your life, even who you are, forever.

But I saw Blake earlier and he said he and Nate were taking off for an overnight business thing. So..." "... you're just going to jump their fence and their pool," I finished for her. Silence. Then Jamie said, "It's twenty-five degrees! In December! Do you know what this means?" "The apocalypse?

That's not a real answer.' Says who?' Says me. I mean real fear, like of failure, of death, of regret. Like that. Something that keeps you awake nights, questioning your very existence.' Clowns.

It doesn't matter, anyway, why you like me. Just that you do.

You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place. But standing there alone on the landing, I thought of Grandma Halley and how she'd held me close against her lap as we watched the sky together. I'd always thought I couldn't remember, but suddenly in that moment, I closed my eyes and saw the comet, finally, brilliant and impossible, stretching above me across the sky.

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've always known who I am. I might not work perfectly, or be like them, but that's okay. I know I work in my own way.

I drove off, with my friends watching me go, all of them grouped on Lissa's hood. As I pulled onto the road, I glanced into the rearview and saw them: they were waving, hands moving through the air, their voices loud, calling out after me. The square of that mirror was like a frame, holding this picture of them saying good-bye, pushing me forward, before shifting gently out of sight, inch by fluid inch, as I turned away.

It takes so little to change everything. If you really thought about it, it would scare you to death.

Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. It just doesn’t catch up, it overtakes … blotting out the future.

"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?"

That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened - good, bad, or anywhere in between - it was always, if nothing else, all your own.

Are you crazy? Flirting with Eli Stock in front of Belissa Norwood, in Belissa Norwood’s house, while eating Belissa Norwood’s cupcakes?

Donneven, Bettaquit and Mmmhmmmm

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.

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

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

Accepting all the good and bad about someone. It's a great thing to aspire to. The hard part is actually doing it.

The world is speaking to you every day, you just don't know how to listen.

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.

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

Fifteen minutes later, a meeting was called. "Okay, look." Deb's face was dead serious. "I know I just joined this project, and I don't want to offend anyone. But I'm going to be honest. I think you've been going about this all wrong." "I'm offended," Dave told her flatly.

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

After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.

It’s the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.

The thing about Wes," Delia said to me, unwrapping another package of turkey, "is that he thinks he can fix anything. And if he can't fix it, he can at least do something with the pieces of what's broken.

That was the thing about being on the inside: the world was just going on, even when it seemed like time for you had stopped for good.

funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story

It sounded stupid, but of course everything does when you're just getting the bare bones facts, only the basics.

I wanted to tell him so. Find the right words, string them together in the ideal way, knowing that here they would have the best chance of sounding perfect.

So I just decided to relax into it, bumpy and crazy as it might be, and try for once to just go along for the ride.

Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore.

Sometimes you dont even want to think aout what people are doing with their groceries.

Well, it's New Year's now but I don't feel that way anymore. I wonder if you do either. Something's happening to me. It's like I'm shrinking smaller and smaller and I can't stp it. There's just os much wrong that I can't imagine the shame in admitting even the tiniest part of it. When you left it was like there was this huge gap to fill, but instead of spreading wide enough to do it I just fell right in, and I'm still falling. Like I'm half-asleep, and I can't wake up, can't wake up.

But she wouldn't. I knew that already. My mother and I had an understanding: we worked together to be as much in control of our shared world as possible. I was suposed to be her other half, carrying my share of the weight. In the last few weeks, I'd tried to shed it, and doing so sent everything off kilter. So of course she would pull me tighter, keeping me in my place, because doing so meant she would always be sure, somehow, of her own.

How do you even begin to return to someone, much less convince them to do the same for you? I had no idea. More than ever, though, right then I had to believe the answer would just come to me.

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.

It wasn’t so much that I was positive. I just wasn’t fully subscribing to such a negative way of thinking anymore.

It hadn't even occured to me that somebody would believe mine.

Maybe it was just part of growing up with someone. Once you have a rhythm and stay with it long enough, it's not hard to find again.