Quotes from Sarah Dessen

You just walk over there and into the office and say, 'Hey, be my prom date,' he said. It's that simple.

But unfriendly is usually one of those things you pick up on right away. You know, like B.O. There's no hiding it if it's there.

What defines you isn't how many times you crash, but the number of times you get back.

Sometimes really, really bad things happen to people, and there is no explanation and no reason whatsoever.

It was so quiet, I could hear my own breathing, loud in my ears. Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything any neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.

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

It's still a memory worth having, even if it's not exactly what you imagined

I should have told you from the start. I will let you down.

I didn't want to leave things the way we had, unresolved, ... and tried to tell myself he cared about me enough not to look elsewhere for what I wasn't giving him.

Just because something's damaged doesn't mean it shouldn't be treated with respect

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

As far as I was concerned, we'd come to a draw: I hadn't wanted to come, and she didn't want me to leave. We were even. But I knew my mother wouldn't see it that way. Lately, we didn't seem to see anything the same.

Isn't that the way everything begins? A night, a love, a once and for all.

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

You stop believing in wishes when the only one you want to make can never come true.

See for me, it's immediate. Silence is so freaking loud.' This seemed either deep or deeply oxymoronic. I wasn't sure which.

Everyone laughed, and just like that, the conversation shifted, jumping to another topic. It was fast and furious, the talking, the emotions, the back-and-forth and forth-and-back. I realized that if I tried to focus on it too much, I got overwhelmed. 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.

I knew that it wouldn't last. It was just a moment, a perfect moment, as time stood still and fleetingly everything fell back into its proper place.

Maybe if I'd agreed to do the debutante thing like she wanted. Or taken up pageants instead of riding jump bikes with a bunch of grungy boys. I'd always tell her, why can't I do both? Who says you have to be either smart or pretty, or into girly stuff or sports? Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?

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.

I am not breaking my rules,' I snapped, hating that I'd ended up on the advice-recieving end of things, jumping from Dear Remy to Confused in Cincinnati all in one summer.

Fine, he repeated, and I wondered why it was I kept coming back to this, again and again, a word that you said when someone asked how you were but didn't really care to know the truth.

Like a blinking cursor on an empty page, it was just the first thing. The beginning of the beginning. But at least it was done.

But when you're alone in the world, really alone, you have no choice but to be open to suggestions.