Sarah Dessen: Thing (page 4)

“and I wondered if, in the end, this is how all disputes are settled, with a shared silence as things become equal. You take something from me, I take something from you. We all want balance, one way or another.”

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

“Sometimes really, really bad things happen to people, and there is no explanation and no reason whatsoever.”

“Sometimes, fewer choices can be a good thing.”

“But unfriendly is usually one of those things you pick up on right away. You know, like B. O. There's no hiding it if it's there.”

“It's harder that in looks," I told him when I finally got back in the car.
"Most things are”

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

“I didn't want to leave things the way we had, unresolved,… and tried to tell myself he cared about me enough not to look elsewhere for what I wasn't giving him.”

“I am not breaking my rules,' I snapped, hating that I'd ended up on the advice-recieving end of things, jumping from Dear Remy to Confused in Cincinnati all in one summer.”

“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.”

“Life isn't only about the big moments whether they be good or bad. Maybe it’s about the small things that stretch out to strengthen the most tenuous bound.”

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

“It was so easy to disown what you couldn’t recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling”

“The only thing I can't stand more than seeing something done wrong is seeing it done slowly.”

“Despite my dad's assurances I was strangely nervous my stomach tight ever since we'd hung up. Maybe Deb had picked up on this and it was why she'd pretty much talked nonstop since I'd approached her and asked for a ride. I'd barely had time to explain the situation before she had launched into a dozen stories to illustrate the point that Things Happened But People Were Okay in the End.”

“It's important." I could hear him moving around, adjusting things, before he came to sit beside me. "Okay," he said. "Take a look."”