Quotes from Sarah Dessen

As if at the age of eighteen life already sucked beyond any hope of improvement.

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.

She tried to be someone people liked. She tried to be someone people disliked. But all I became was someone who didn't succeed with anything I tried to be.

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.

And guys don't get attached, guys don't give themselves over completely, and guys lie. That's why they should be handled with great trepidation, not trusted, and held at arm's length whenever possible.

All I'd wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this.

But I'm kind of used to being invisible

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

You're always a kid around your parents… Unless they're acting like children. Then you don't get the chance.

Says the girl with no thyme.

Sometimes. It was a good escape. Until, you know, it wasn"t.

But it was even worse when you knew at that very moment that there was still time to save yourself, and yet you couldn't even budge.

It wasn't until Kiffney-Brown, when I met Jason Talbot, that I really thought I might actually have one of those boyfriend kind of stories to tell the next time I got together with my old friends. Jason was smart, good-looking, and seriously on the rebound after his girlfriend at Jackson dumped him for, in his words, 'a juvenile delinquent welder with a tattoo'.

Even if you couldn't see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked do hare, all alone to grow.

The mistakes you make now count. Not for everything, and not forever. But they do matter, and they shape you.

I'd been through so much, falling short again and again, and only recently had found a place where who I was, right now, was enough.

If nothing else, now we knew where to find each other, even if only time would tell if either of us would ever come looking.

You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.

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

As he heard me approach, he quickly leaped up, grabbing a nearby loaf of bread and holding it in front of him as if struck by a sudden desire to make a sandwich.

It's the same thing,' I told her. 'What is?' 'Being afraid and being alive.' 'No,' she said slowly, and now it was as if she was speaking a language she knew at first I wouldn't understand, the very words, not to mention the concept, being foreign to me. 'Macy, no. It's not.

In a way, I was almost happy to see her. The worst part of me, out in the flesh. Blinking back at me in the dim light, daring me to call her a name other than my own.

So you should remember that, when you're thinking about what other people can deal with. Maybe it's not so bad.

I don't think anyone would think that an ellipsis represents doubt or anything. I think it's more, you know, hinting at the future. What lies ahead.