Sarah Dessen

"Some people, they can't just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me... I don't know. I didn't want to fix it, to forget. It wasn't something that was broken. It's just...something that happened. And like that hole, I'm just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time."

"I like flaws. I think they make things interesting."

"It's all in the view. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count."

"As I rolled over, stretching out, my only thought was to go back to the dream I'd been having, which I couldn't remember, other than that it had been good, in that distant, hopeful way unreal things can be."

"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."

"The future was one thing that could never be broken, because it had not yet had the chance to be anything."

"I love writing about the summer between high school and college. It's the last gasp of really being a teen."

"When I was a teen, I was never really into the captain of the football team or the student body president. The guys I liked were quirky and different: They listened to music I'd never heard of, never had lunch or gas money, and could always make you laugh."

"Isn't it weird? The way you remember things when it's gone."

"It's hard to be nice when the rest of the world is so mean."

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

"There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying."

"“He wasn't the type for displays of affection, either verbal or not. He was disgusted by couples that made out in the hallways between classes, and got annoyed at even the slightest sappy moments in movies. But I knew he cared about me: he just conveyed it more subtly, as concise with expressing this emotion as he was with everything else. It was in the way he'd put his hand on the small of my back, for instance, or how he'd smile at me when I said something that surprised him. Once I might have wanted more, but I'd come around to his way of thinking in the time we'd been together. And we were together, all the time. So he didn't have to prove how he felt about me. Like so much else, I should just know.”"

"“You couldn't just pick and choose at will when someone depended on you, or loved you. It wasn't like a light switch, easy to turn on or off. If you were in, you were in. Out, you were out.”"

"“Relationships dont always make sense. Especially from the outside”"

"Well, it's true that I have been hurt in my life. Quite a bit. But it's also true that I have loved, and been loved. and that carries a weight of its own. A greater weight, in my opinion. It's like that pie chart we talked about earlier. in the end, I'll look back on my life and see that the greatest piece of it was love. The problems, the divorces, the sadness... those will be there too, but just smaller slivers, tiny pieces."

"All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below."

"I knew, in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late: again, I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extended my hand, whatever the outcome. Okay, he said. He took a breath. What would you do, if you could do anything?I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. This, I said. And then I kissed him."

"So you're always honest, I said. Aren't you?No, I told him. I'm not. Well, that's good to know, I guess. I'm not saying I'm a liar, I told him. He raised his eyebrows. That's not how I meant it, anyways. How'd you mean it, then?I just... I don't always say what I feel. Why not?Because the truth sometimes hurts, I said. Yeah, he said. So do lies, though."

"That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking."