Top 500 Sarah Dessen Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “You can’t always get the perfect moment. Sometimes, you just have to do the best you can under the circumstances.”

— Sarah Dessen

102. “You can’t just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can’t plan the moment you lose your way in the first place.”

— Sarah Dessen

103. “Love is so unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll know a man for years and then one day, boom! Suddenly you see him in a different way. And other times, it’s that first date, that first moment. That’s what makes it so great.”

— Sarah Dessen

104. “But you only get so many do-overs in this life, so many chances to, if not change your past, alter your future.”

— Sarah Dessen

105. “Just me and the future, finally together. Now there was a happy ending I could believe in.”

— Sarah Dessen

106. “I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone. As long as I didn’t say it aloud, it wasn’t real.”

— Sarah Dessen

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107. “But something, somehow, had made all these paths converge. You couldn’t find it on a checklist, or work it into the equation. It just happened.”

— Sarah Dessen

108. “Told you. Everything sounds better in the car wash.”

— Sarah Dessen

109. “Fall in love with someone who truly deserves your heart. Not with someone who plays with it.”

— Sarah Dessen

110. “She stroked my hair and told me I was beautiful, but I was old enough by then to know not to believe it anymore.”

— Sarah Dessen

111. “I had no illusions about love anymore. It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn’t. People weren’t meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say.”

— Sarah Dessen

112. “All the bitchy girls in the world are just a training ground for what men can do to you.”

— Sarah Dessen

113. “It was just perfect, just right all at once.”

— Sarah Dessen

114. “It’s funny how someone’s perception of you can be formed without you even knowing it.”

— Sarah Dessen

115. “People will tell you what they want you to know.”

— Sarah Dessen

116. “There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you’ve carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.”

— Sarah Dessen

117. “This Lullaby is only a few words, a simple run of chords, quiet here in this spare room, but you can hear it, hear it, wherever you may go, even if I let you down, this lullaby plays on...”

— Sarah Dessen

118. “It’s okay to accept things from people. It doesn’t make you weak or helpless.”

— Sarah Dessen

119. “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.”

— Sarah Dessen

120. “It was so easy to disown what you couldn’t recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. The only person you can be sure to control, always, is yourself. Which is a lot to be sure of, but at the same time, not enough.”

— Sarah Dessen

121. “I mean, at first, it was kind of disappointing. But people recover from disappointment. Otherwise we’d all be hanging from nooses. Right?”

— Sarah Dessen

122. “I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.”

— Sarah Dessen

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123. “If something doesn’t work exactly right, or maybe needs some special treatment, you don’t just throw it away. Everything can’t be fully operational all the time. Sometimes, we need to have the patience to give something the little nudge it needs.”

— Sarah Dessen

124. “So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

125. “I had to wonder whether it was possible that this wasn’t already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this was my one last chance to try and prove it. There was no way to know. There never is. But I reached out and took it anyway.”

— Sarah Dessen

126. “But if everything was always smooth and perfect, you’d get too used to that, 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.”

— Sarah Dessen

127. “There’s something nice about the silence of a car ride in the dark, going home. When you were tired of the radio and conversation, and it was okay to just be alone with your thoughts and the road ahead. If you’re that comfortable with someone, you don’t have to talk.”

— Sarah Dessen

128. “Something had changed in me, even if I didn’t know what it was just yet. All I could think was that I felt alive for the first time.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

129. “I knew that 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.”

— Sarah Dessen

130. “Editing is hard but nowhere NEAR as tough as facing that blank page and blinking cursor each day. You’re all alone and no one else can do it. At least with editing you have someone in the trench with you.”

— Sarah Dessen

131. “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.”

— Sarah Dessen

132. “Their words, like the music, had the potential to be endless.”

— Sarah Dessen

133. “It takes so little to change everything. If you really thought about it, it would scare you to death.”

— Sarah Dessen

134. “What happened to goodbye?”

— Sarah Dessen

135. “When you can’t save yourself or your heart, it helps to be able to save face.”

— Sarah Dessen

136. “Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away.”

— Sarah Dessen

137. “Maybe it was true, and being a girl could be about interest rates and skinny jeans, riding bikes and wearing pink. Not about any one thing, but everything.”

— Sarah Dessen

138. “But I always worked harder when I was up against something, or when someone assumed I couldn’t succeed. That’s what drove me, all those nights studying. The fact that so many figured I couldn’t do it.”

— Sarah Dessen

139. “And always remember how much your crazy sister loves you.”

— Sarah Dessen

140. “I always wrote about girls that went to the beach and had that summer that changed everything. So I was interested in what it would be like to live in a tourist town where everyone has these life changing experiences, but your whole life is there.”

— Sarah Dessen

141. “When someone starts to change, and it’s obvious, it’s sort of natural to wonder why. Right?”

— Sarah Dessen

142. “Says the girl with no thyme.”

— Sarah Dessen

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

— Sarah Dessen

144. “A life isn’t just the pages you know, it’s everything.”

— Sarah Dessen

145. “This is a 911? You know you only text that when someone is dead or dying. You scared the crap out of me.”

— Sarah Dessen

146. “I find that the more I depend on real life, the less interesting the story is. It’s much more common for me to take something that almost-happened, or I wish had happened, and then follow that possibility.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Real Quotes

147. “Like a blinking cursor on an empty page, it was just the first thing. The beginning of the beginning. But at least it was done.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

148. “What you need, 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?”

— Sarah Dessen

149. “Its 75 Degrees! In December!”

— Sarah Dessen

150. “All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control. To be real.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Real Quotes