Top 500 Sarah Dessen Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I wondered if it was really because he cared about me, or if now I was just another challenge.”

— Sarah Dessen

452. “I just have to be super strong when it comes to my work time. Shut the browser, ignore the email alerts, and just WRITE.”

— Sarah Dessen

453. “I’m starting to think, though, that some things never get that. The replay, and all. So at some point you have to make peace with it as it is, not keep waiting for a chance to change it.”

— Sarah Dessen

454. “How do you even begin to return to someone, much less convince them to do the same for you? I had no idea. More than ever, though, right then I had to believe the answer would just come to me.”

— Sarah Dessen

455. “I always thought I was different.”

— Sarah Dessen

456. “Odd how it was so easy for a stranger to assume such familiarity. Especially when those who were supposed to know you best often didn’t, not at all.”

— Sarah Dessen

457. “We were willing to do so much for the people we loved, even if it meant hurting ourselves. Maybe that, in the end, was what love- all kinds- was really about.”

— Sarah Dessen

458. “If what you’re asking is how I debated whether or not to love her the answer is I didn’t. Not at all. It just happened. I didn’t ever question it; by the time I realized what was happening, it was already done.”

— Sarah Dessen

459. “It was as familiar to me as a song I’d been hearing my whole life, covered by various people but the basic tune the same.”

— Sarah Dessen

460. “I didnt pay atteniton to times or distance, instead focusing on how it felt just to be in motion, knowing it wasn’t about the finish line but how I got there that mattered.”

— Sarah Dessen

461. “He wasn’t what I’d thought he was; maybe he never had been. I wasn’t what I’d thought I was, either.”

— Sarah Dessen

462. “That’s the thing about someone who rarely gets upset: when they do, you notice.”

— Sarah Dessen

463. “I’d been convinced I was on the outside, but really, I’d always been within arm’s reach. All I had to do was ask, and I, too, would be easily brought back, surrounded and immersed, finding myself safe, somewhere in between.”

— Sarah Dessen

464. “I didn’t want to talk about what happened, so it seemed safest not to talk at all.”

— Sarah Dessen

465. “I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself fo the next hit, and fel something. Something grainy and samll, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park. Oh Cass, I thought. I miss you so, so much.”

— Sarah Dessen

466. “He’d always had that fearless optimism that made cynics like me squirm. I wondered if it was enough for both of us. I would never know from here, though. And time was passing. Crucial minutes and seconds, each one capable of changing everything.”

— Sarah Dessen

467. “Story of my life.”

— Sarah Dessen

468. “Some things you don’t have to tell. Some things, between sisters, are understood.”

— Sarah Dessen

469. “Teenagers are a great audience and they are fearless about asking what they want to know.”

— Sarah Dessen

470. “So finally, I decided that the best response – the safest – was none at all.”

— Sarah Dessen

471. “It all depends on how you choose to live it. It’s like forever, always changing.”

— Sarah Dessen

472. “The first boy was always the hardest.”

— Sarah Dessen

473. “But I think, personally, that it would be worse to have been alone all that time. Sure, maybe I would have protected my heart from some things, but would that really have been better? To hold myself apart because I was too scared that something might no be forever?”

— Sarah Dessen

474. “Events conspired to bring you back to where you’d been. It was what you did then that made all the difference: it was all about potential.”

— Sarah Dessen

475. “This is what daughters did. They left, and came home later with lives of their own.”

— Sarah Dessen

476. “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.”

— Sarah Dessen

477. “I never really know what I’m going to write next until it comes to me. So we’ll just have to see what happens.”

— Sarah Dessen

478. “As if it didnt matter what was on, but instead how hard i was listening.”

— Sarah Dessen

479. “I’d seen another shade of him, and if it had been light where we were now, he’d have seen the same of me. So I was grateful, as I had been so often in my life, for the dark.”

— Sarah Dessen

480. “Its 75 Degrees! In December!”

— Sarah Dessen

481. “I thought of all the times we’d been together, how I kept coming closer, then retreating, while he stayed right where he was. A constant in a world where few, if any, really existed.”

— Sarah Dessen

482. “I think if you’re going to show a true representation of any one life, it can’t be about any one thing. I try to see more of a full picture, with the romance just a single part.”

— Sarah Dessen

483. “Honesty in principle was one thing. In someone’s face, it was another.”

— Sarah Dessen

484. “Every book teaches me something about my process, and they are all challenging in one way or another.”

— Sarah Dessen

485. “I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second place finishes left behind.”

— Sarah Dessen

486. “Just because a person isn’t talking about something doesn’t mean it’s not on their mind. Often, in fact, it’s why they won’t speak of it.”

— Sarah Dessen

487. “But against love, the case was solid. Easily argued. And you could, indeed, hold it in your hand.”

— Sarah Dessen

488. “Some writers pick a topic and write around that, but I like to include it all.”

— Sarah Dessen

489. “The language of solace, and comets, and the girls we all become, in the end.”

— Sarah Dessen

490. “It’s a big deal when you finally get the chance to do the one thing you want to do -need to do- more than anything. It can kind of scare the crap out of you.”

— Sarah Dessen

491. “There was nothing, nothing to depend on. And why was I surprised?”

— Sarah Dessen

492. “This true difference in me now: I had these experiances, these tales, more of this life. So maybe it wasn’t the fairy tale. But those stories weren’t real anyway. Mine were.”

— Sarah Dessen

493. “How weird that must be, to stay the same as everyone else changes.”

— Sarah Dessen

494. “Really, it had been stupid to expect anything anyway. A few late nights does not a habit, or a relationship, make.”

— Sarah Dessen

495. “I think part of the problem sometimes is that there’s so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.”

— Sarah Dessen

496. “I thought again how you could never really know what you were seeing with just a glance, in motion, passing by. Good or bad, right or wrong. There was always so much more.”

— Sarah Dessen

497. “Quiet and incredible. I really envy that.”

— Sarah Dessen

498. “Why don’t you ever wait a second and see what I’m planning, or thinking, before you burst in with your opinions and ideas? You never even give me a chance.”

— Sarah Dessen

499. “At the same time, though, I was beginning to wonder if this was just how it was supposed to be for me, like perhaps I wasn’t capable of having that many people in my life at any one time. My mom turned up, Nate walked away, one door opening as another clicked shut.”

— Sarah Dessen

500. “That was the thing about being on the inside: the world was just going on, even when it seemed like time for you had stopped for good.”

— Sarah Dessen