Quotes from Sarah Dessen

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

I wondered if it was really because he cared about me, or if now I was just another challenge.

I realized all those times I'd felt people stare at me, their faces had been pictures, abstracts. None of them were mirrors, able to reflect back the expression I thought only I wore, the feelings only I felt. Until now, this moment, as our eyes met. If there was a way to recognize something you'd never seen but still knew by heart, I felt it as I looked at his face. Finally, someone understood.

The people who know you best can be risker, because the words they say and things they think have the potential to be not only scary but true, as well.

Quiet and incredible. I really envy that.

The first boy was always the hardest.

It took a lot to have hope in this world where so little evidence of it existed. Maybe if nothing bad had ever happened, you didn't even consider those clouds and storms ahead. But for the rest of us, even the brightest sunshine carried a chance of rain.

There were so many levels to the unknown, from safe to dangerous to outright nebulous, scariest of all.

He ate in your car? No shit?

But the original was there as well—more jaded and rudimentary, functional rather than romantic. It fit not just the yellow house but another door, deep within my own heart. One that had been locked so tight for so long that I was afraid to even try it for fear of what might be on the other side

Now we were both in motion again, moving ahead. So what if there were questions left unanswered. Life went on. We knew that better than anyone.

Maybe you could go backwards and forwards at the same time, but it wasn't easy. You had to want to.

There were so many places in my time with Rogerson that I wished I could go back to, hitting the stop button at just one moment to stop everything that came after. I had so many If Onlys, but each place I thought to stop meant missing something that came later. I needed it all, in the end, to make my own story find its finish.

So finally, I decided that the best response — the safest — was none at all.

why should i always have to do the looking?why can't other people do the look out for me?

Meow,' Cat Norman said simply, parking his big butt by my foot and looking up at me. 'Meow.' 'I hate you,' I told him. He didn't even flinch.

The words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

Having no expectations for some people in your life can be depressing, if not devastating. But with others, it's what is necessary. The hard part is not just figuring out which one applies, but accepting it.

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.

Family,"_ _ _"They're the people in your life you don't get to pick. The ones that are given to you, as opposed to those you get to choose.

This was our common ground, the secret we shared but never spoke aloud. I should have been with him; she should have left him alone. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense.

As long as you were moving, you were always going somewhere.

Anger's not bad, he said. It's human...

Happy, normal lives going on in happy, normal ways, in a world that was anything but. Once you realized this, experienced something that made it crystal clear, you couldn't forget it. Like a face. Or a name. However you first learn that truth, once it's with you, it never really goes away.