Quotes from Sarah Dessen

Maybe not, she said as we came to the car. But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works.

It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be.

I mean, it's not surprising, really. Once you love something, you always love it in some way. You have to. It's, like, part of you for good.

But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren't what people wanted to hear.

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.

Pieces and parts were always easier to process. The full picture, the entire story, was another thing entirely. But you just never knew. Sometimes, people could surprise you.

But it's strange, when you've always been told something is true, like the moon will come back. You need proof. And while you wait, you feel the entire balance of your world just tipping. It's crazy. But when it's over, and it does come back, that's the best, because it's all you want, everything narrows to just that. It's this great rush, like for that one second everything's okay with the world again. It's amazing.

Love is so unpredictable. That's what makes it so great.

All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear. And if you're lucky, there's someone close enough by to shoulder the rest.

There's just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise.

So while it seemed like you were seeing everything, you really weren't. Just bits and pieces that looked like a whole.

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?

I was worn out, broken: He had taken almost everything. But he'd been all I'd had, all this time. And when the police led him away, I pulled out of the hands of all these loved one, sobbing, screaming, everything hurting, to try and make him stay.

I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't.

It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.

The further you go, the more you have to be proud of. At the same time, in order to come a long way, you have to be behind to begin with. IN the end, though maybe it's not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all.

Because the truth sometimes hurts, I said. Yeah, he said. So do lies, though.

If you didn't always have to choose between turning away for good or rushing in deeper. In the moments that it really counts, maybe it's enough - more than enough, even - just to be there.

You can't just turn your heart off like a faucet; you have to go to the source and dry it out, drop by drop.

She knew I could tell with one glance, one look, one simple instant. It was her eyes. Despite the thick makeup, they were still dark-rimmed., haunted, and sad. Most of all though, they were familiar. The fact that we were in front of hundreds of strangers changed nothing at all. I'd spent a summer with those same eyes-scared, lost, confused-staring back at me. I would have known them anywhere.

Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. it doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it, the only one that can ever get you home.

But it was okay not to fit in everywhere, as long as you did somewhere.

This is exactly what i wanted, as commitments had never really been my thing. And it wasn't like it was hard, either. The only trick was never giving more than you were willing to lose.

But in the real world, you couldnt really just split a family down the middle, mom on one side, dad the other, with the child equally divided between. It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again. It was what you couldn't see, those tiniest of pieces, that were lost in the severing, and their absence kept everything from being complete.