Quotes from 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.

From what I could see, the hardwood was just fine. Then again, I'd just see a windmill and an open sky, too, never feeling the need to conquer either. You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

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

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

Everything had started in such sharp detail, each aspect pronounced and clear. Obviously, endings were different. Harder to see, full of shapes that could be one thing or another, with all the things that you were once so sure of suddenly not familiar, if they were even recognizable at all.

That was one of the things about the night. Stuff that would be weird in the bright light of day just wasn't so much once you passed a certain hour. It was like the dark just evened it all out somehow.

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?

It [I'm leaving] wasn't really necessary to say, especially if you were already walking away. Almost redundant. And yet, there was a comfort in being no question, no room for doubt.

Despite my dad's assurances I was strangely nervous my stomach tight ever since we'd hung up. Maybe Deb had picked up on this and it was why she'd pretty much talked nonstop since I'd approached her and asked for a ride. I'd barely had time to explain the situation before she had launched into a dozen stories to illustrate the point that Things Happened But People Were Okay in the End.

When someone starts to change, and it's obvious, it's sort of natural to wonder why. Right?

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

I wasn't ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn't that I wasn't right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn't right for me. There was a difference. Even for someone who things didn't come easy for, someone like me.

Sitting there with them, it was almost hard to remember when I first came to Perkins, so determined to remember to be a one-woman operation to the end. But that was the thing about taking help and giving it, or so I was learning; there was no such thing as really getting even. Instead, this connection, once opened, remained ongoing over time.

I would have thought this would make me feel better.. getting to be the one to leave and not the one left behind. But it didn't. Not at all.

For you, I wish for second chances

She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over.

I looked down again at the sign in my hand - ENJOY THE RIDE! - and it seemed, suddenly, to be just that. A sign.

All I wanted - all I'd ever wanted - was just to get away. To be somewhere small where I could crowd in and feel safe, all four walls pressed around me, no one staring or pointing or yelling.

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.

n the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal.

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.

One open, one closed. It was no wonder that the first image that came to mind when I thought of either of my sisters was a door. With Kirsten, it was the front one to our house, through which she was always coming in or out, usually in mid-sentence, a gaggle of friends trailing behind her. Whitney's was the one to her bedroom, which she preferred to keep shut between her and the rest of us, always.

Sometimes forgetting was just as bad as remembering.

No matter where you are, home or the strangest of places, everyone wants to look like they know where they're going.