Quotes from Sarah Dessen

My own life felt flat and sad too much of the time; it was reassuring, somehow, to lose myself in someone else's

what you deserve, is a guy who adores you for what you are. Who doesn't see you as a project, but a prize. You know?

You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you'll never really enjoy it when things go right. I

I heard the patio door slide open, then footsteps as my father walked out onto the deck. A breeze blew in — hot and sticky-wet — before the door slid shut again. When I looked outside, through the glass, he was standing with his back to me, looking up at the few stars visible through the fast-moving clouds.

It was a feeling I'd woken up with one morning, a kind of whirring in my ears and an instability to the world, like things were coming to a head. I faced myself in the bathroom mirror and looked into my eyes, wondering if I would see something new in them, something crackling and different. I felt strong, as if every muscle in my body was taut and lean, not creaky and bony anymore.

It's funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning.

He moved through our house now with the ease of someone who no longer considered himself a guest, no sidestepping knickknacks and perching on the edges of furniture but walking easily across the floors as if he belonged there.

Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.

Lightning didn't strike twice, except when it did.

When's something difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder- if not impossible- to lose.

I loved him so much," I said. "No one can even understand what losing him was like." "That's the thing, though." He exhaled, looking down. "I wasn't trying to get what it was about him. I just felt that finally, maybe, i was starting to understand you.

You know," he said after a moment, "it's a shame you feel that way. Because I think he likes you." I just looked at him. "Did you not hear him tell me I was fat the other day?" "He didn't say you were fat," Nate replied. "He said you looked a little rotund." "How is that different?

Good be- gets bad, something lost leads to found...

People don't change. If anything, you get more set in your ways as you get older, not less.

It was easier to just be mad at my mom; sympathy and empathy are complicated things.

I'm not very good at accepting help, I said. It's an issue.

I deserved to grow, and to change, to become all the girls I could ever be over the course of my life, each one better than the last.

Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now.

The true story...is the realization that no time in your life is ever perfect, that even the best memories have cracks you might not see.

Because you have to just go with the flow. Your life is not your own, with people coming in and out all the time. You get mellow because you have to.

On the whole, I think I spent a lot of high school just trying to stay under the radar: I don't think I was all that memorable.

I always wished I could move around and switch schools. It was hard to have these radical transformations. You'd think, 'I will be a totally different person tomorrow,' but it never worked.

Once you love something, you always love it in someway. You have to. it's like, part of you for good.

Her life was perfect. But as was often the case, the rest of us were still adjusting.