Top 500 Sarah Dessen Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Everything always gets crazy at the end. You just have to keep going, regardless of how awful it gets. So that’s what I do.”

— Sarah Dessen

353. “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

354. “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

355. “It took a lot of work to be perfect. If you didn’t want to break a sweat, there was no point in even bothering.”

— Sarah Dessen

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

— Sarah Dessen

357. “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

358. “This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.”

— Sarah Dessen

359. “It was like reaching for someone’s hand, then missing their fingers, or even their arm, and hitting their shoulder instead. But no matter. You hang on tight anyway.”

— Sarah Dessen

360. “Because anyone that can make you feel that bad about yourself is toxic.”

— Sarah Dessen

361. “Never would forever, with all its meanings, be so clear and distinct as in the true, guaranteed end of the world.”

— Sarah Dessen

362. “So he didn’t have to prove how he felt about me. Like so much else, I should just know.”

— Sarah Dessen

363. “Just because someone’s pretty, doesn’t mean she’s decent.”

— Sarah Dessen

364. “And that was it; it was so easy for her. My own memories did not even belong to me. But I knew she was wrong. I had seen that comet. I knew it as well as I knew my own face, my own hands. My own heart.”

— Sarah Dessen

365. “I don’t think anyone would think that an ellipsis represents doubt or anything. I think it’s more, you know, hinting at the future. What lies ahead.”

— Sarah Dessen

366. “So many times it seemed like there were chances to stop things before they started. Or even stop them in midstream. But it was even worse when you knew in that very moment that there was still time to save yourself, and yet you couldn’t even budge.”

— Sarah Dessen

367. “Here was a boy who liked flaws, who saw them not as failings but as strengths. Who knew such a person could exist, or what would have happened if we’d found each other under different circumstances? Maybe in a perfect world. But not in this one.”

— Sarah Dessen

368. “It’s never something huge that changes the everything, but instead the tiniest of details, irrevocably tweaking the balance of the universe while you’re busy focusing on the big picture.”

— Sarah Dessen

369. “If you’re not getting hurt, you’re not riding hard enough.”

— Sarah Dessen

370. “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

371. “Life is big and huge and scary. But you have to go and take your part of it. There’s a reason the saying is ‘Seize the day,’ not ‘Wait for it to come along at some point.”

— Sarah Dessen

372. “All of my stories, they don’t come from my high school experience, but they’re definitely based on things that happened to me in high school, or things that happened to friends of mine, or things that I wish had happened to me.”

— Sarah Dessen

373. “Because if you were the problem, chances were you could also be the solution. The only way to find out was to take another shot.”

— Sarah Dessen

374. “When you have a kid, you sign on for the whole package: good, bad, everything in between. you can’t just dip in and out, picking and choosing the parts you want and quitting when it’s not perfect.”

— Sarah Dessen

375. “So I learned another system: When in doubt, keep it out – out of earshot, out of the house – even if this meant, really, just keeping it in.”

— Sarah Dessen

376. “I understood now. This voice, the one that had been trying to get my attention all this time, calling out to me, begging me to hear it – it wan’t Will’s. It was mine.”

— Sarah Dessen

377. “If nothing else, now we knew where to find each other, even if only time would tell if either of us would ever come looking.”

— Sarah Dessen

378. “But even more so, it reminded me that this was all really happening. Stanford. The end of the summer. The beginning of my real life. It was no longer just creeping up, peeking over the horizon, but instead lingering in plain sight.”

— Sarah Dessen

379. “When you don’t know where you’re going, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to have more than you need.”

— Sarah Dessen

380. “I knew I had to keep him to myself, as I’d slowly begun to keep everything. We had secrets now, truths and half-truths, that kept her always at arm’s length, behind a closed door, miles away.”

— Sarah Dessen

381. “If you didn’t always have to choose between turning away for good or rushing in deeper. In the moments that it really counts, maybe it’s enough – more than enough, even – just to be there.”

— Sarah Dessen

382. “I’ve found in my own life that if my writing isn’t going well, not much else will. It is the one constant, the key to everything else.”

— Sarah Dessen

383. “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

384. “I would miss Colby, but it wasn’t going anywhere. All the more reason why I should.”

— Sarah Dessen

385. “When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a colouring book, with the inside not yet completed.”

— Sarah Dessen

386. “I was just stock in the middle, vague and undefined.”

— Sarah Dessen

387. “It was like discovering that some part of you wasn’t yours at all. And it made me wonder what else I couldn’t claim.”

— Sarah Dessen

388. “And to know me, as you have discovered, is to love me.”

— Sarah Dessen

389. “It was a basic plot in any number of her books: girl strikes out, makes good, finds love, gets revenge. In that order. The making good and striking out part I liked. The rest would just be bonus.”

— Sarah Dessen

390. “I always say that teenagers are the first to know if you’re pandering to them.”

— Sarah Dessen

391. “As if at the age of eighteen life already sucked beyond any hope of improvement.”

— Sarah Dessen

392. “It’s always very pure, that last moment before an ugly, unsettling truth hits someone. The most stark of before-and-afters.”

— Sarah Dessen

393. “I reached up with my finger and traced the scar over my eyebrow, remembering when that was the greatest hurt I’d ever known.”

— Sarah Dessen

394. “She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over.”

— Sarah Dessen

395. “If someone is really close with you, your getting upset or them getting upset is okay, and they don’t change because of it. It’s just part of the relationship. It happens. You deal with it.”

— Sarah Dessen

396. “You own a Tic Tac. Gum is just borrowed. – Esther.”

— Sarah Dessen

397. “Maybe it was just part of growing up with someone. Once you have a rhythm and stay with it long enough, it’s not hard to find again.”

— Sarah Dessen

398. “How ballsy it was to just assume you know, with one glance, the things another person could live without. As if it was the same for everyone, that simple.”

— Sarah Dessen

399. “I always tried to imagine what it would be like to open your door to find something you had given up on. maybe it had seen places you never had, been rerouted and passed through so many strange hands, but still somehow found its way back to you, all before the day even began.”

— Sarah Dessen

400. “And while it is hard enough to take away something that makes a person happy it’s even more difficult when it seems like it’s the only thing.”

— Sarah Dessen