Top 500 Sarah Dessen Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “I wasn’t very happy in high school: it was a confusing and sort of sad time for me.”

— Sarah Dessen

302. “It’s nice to have options even if you can’t take them.”

— Sarah Dessen

303. “You could just tell when a person belonged somewhere. That is something you can’t fake, no matter how hard you try.”

— Sarah Dessen

304. “It’s a choice, Annabel. And if you make the wrong one, you have only yourself to blame when there are consequences.”

— Sarah Dessen

305. “Maybe you could go backwards and forwards at the same time, but it wasn’t easy. You had to want to.”

— Sarah Dessen

306. “You can’t make any one person your world. The trick is to take what each can give you and build a world from it.”

— Sarah Dessen

307. “This was just one night, one chance to vary and see where it took me. The fireflies were probably already out: maybe it wasn’t just a season or a time but a whole world I’d forgotten. I’d never know until I stepped out into it. So I did.”

— Sarah Dessen

308. “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.”

— Sarah Dessen

309. “And I felt a sudden whirl in my head, knowing this leap was inevitable, that I wasn’t just standing on the cliff, toes poking over, but already in mid-air.”

— Sarah Dessen

310. “There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Real Quotes

311. “This felt right. Not just leaving, but how I was doing it. Without regret, without second guessing. And with Wes right there, holding the door open for me as I walked out into the light.”

— Sarah Dessen

312. “If only you could really use a fail-proof system to know who was worth keeping and who needed to be thrown away. It would make it so much easier to move through the world, picking and choosing what connections to make, or whether to make any at all.”

— Sarah Dessen

313. “Are you crazy? Flirting with Eli Stock in front of Belissa Norwood, in Belissa Norwood’s house, while eating Belissa Norwood’s cupcakes?”

— Sarah Dessen

314. “Clearly, sharing something could take you a long way, or at least to a different place than you’d planned. Like a friendship or a family, or even jsut alone on a curb on a Saturday, trying to get your bearings as best you can.”

— Sarah Dessen

315. “I have SO many books I didn’t sell. Some my agent rejected outright, others made it all the way to my editor to be turned away. Not everything is a winner, which is tough when you’ve devoted eight or nine months of your life to something.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Book Quotes

316. “It was like that part of my life, was just gone. It was almost too easy, for something I once thought had meant everything.”

— Sarah Dessen

317. “It wasn’t like I was some expert on the meaning of being supportive. Was it being loyal even against your better judgement? Or, like Olivia, was it making your displeasure known from the start, even when someone didn’t want to hear it?”

— Sarah Dessen

318. “Nothing like being scolded by a hippie.”

— Sarah Dessen

319. “Right now, though, I wanted not to think forward or backward, but only to lose myself in the words.”

— Sarah Dessen

320. “There’s something about dancing that’s like being stripped naked; you have to be very self-confident to thrash around in public, deliberately attracting attention. I’d never been that way, even without the weight that once kept me in everyone’s eyes. Dancers were the lightest and brightest of butterflies, while girls like me stayed low, bellies scraping along the floor, and watched from there.”

— Sarah Dessen

321. “You asked me to go out with you. I know you probably changed your mind. But you should know, the answer was yes. It’s always been yes when it comes to you.”

— Sarah Dessen

322. “If there was a way to recognize something you’d never seen but still knew by heart, I felt it as I looked at his face. Finally, someone understood.”

— Sarah Dessen

323. “People get mad Annabel. Its not the end of the world.”

— Sarah Dessen

324. “But there was something I liked about the idea of those seeds buried so deep having at least a chance to emerge.”

— Sarah Dessen

325. “I think I’m too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.”

— Sarah Dessen

326. “Remy: Did you really believe, that first day, that we were meant to be together? Dexter: You’re here, aren’t you?”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

327. “It seemed like this day could go in so many directions, like a spiderweb shooting out toward endless possibilities.”

— Sarah Dessen

328. “Isn’t that the way everything begins? A night, a love, a once and for all.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Romance Quotes

329. “It took a lot of work to be perfect.”

— Sarah Dessen

330. “But those words were only the middle of the story. There was a beginning here, too.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

331. “I wondered if emotions were like menstrual cycles, if you get enough women together. Give it time, and everyone was crying.”

— Sarah Dessen

332. “We can all be beautiful girls.”

— Sarah Dessen

333. “It’s about the courage to go for what you want, not just what you think you need. Sometimes we don’t even know what that is.”

— Sarah Dessen

334. “Even if you couldn’t see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked do hare, all alone to grow.”

— Sarah Dessen

335. “I think when you’re a beginning author with any publishing company, there’s only so much they can put behind you.”

— Sarah Dessen

336. “Everyone had a forever, but given a choice, this would be mine. The one that began in this moment, with Wes, in a kiss that took my breath away, then gave it back – leaving me astounded, amazed, and most of all, alive.”

— Sarah Dessen

337. “The kind who live for music and are constantly seeking it out, anywhere they can. Who can’t imagine a life without it. They’re enlightened.”

— Sarah Dessen

338. “I was tired of hanging on, taking the torn pieces to make something whole with them.”

— Sarah Dessen

339. “This was always the problem with my mother and me, I suddenly realized. There were so many things we thought we agreed on, but anythign can have two meanings. Like sides of a coin, it just matters how it falls.”

— Sarah Dessen

340. “But for now, I just sat there on the bed and listened to my song. The one that had been written for me by a man who knew me not at all, now sung by the one who knew me best.”

— Sarah Dessen

341. “I didn’t trot my pain out to show around. I kept it better hidden than anyone. I did.”

— Sarah Dessen

342. “A lot can change between planning something and actually doing it. But maybe all that really matters is that anything is different at all.”

— Sarah Dessen

343. “Whenever you made a choice, especially one you’d been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.”

— Sarah Dessen

344. “You get what you give, but also what you’re willing to take.”

— Sarah Dessen

345. “When he stopped walking and kissed me a few minutes later, it was like time had stopped, with the air, my heart, and the world all so still. And it was this I remembered every other time I was with Marshall.”

— Sarah Dessen

346. “What do you do when you finally hear everything you’ve always thought said aloud?”

— Sarah Dessen

347. “My first signing was at my hometown independent bookstore and everyone in the world came. It was so nice. My family was there, my parents, everybody I worked with, all my friends. So I had this great first reading with a like hundred people there.”

— Sarah Dessen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

348. “Looking back, it seemed like it should have been harder to lose someone, or have them lose you, especially when they were in the same state, only a few towns over.”

— Sarah Dessen

349. “Like I, of all people, didn’t know better than to lead a total stranger to the point where they could hurt me most, knowing how easily they’d be able to find their way back to it.”

— Sarah Dessen

350. “She took the sun when it came and the rain the same way.”

— Sarah Dessen