Sarah Dessen: Want (page 2)

“When faced with the scariest of things, all you want to do is turn away, hide in your own invisible place. But you can't. That's why it's not only important for us to be seen, but to have someone to look for us, as well.”

“But anyone can begin. It was the part with all the promise, the potential, the things I loved. More and more, though, I was finding myself wanting to find out what happened in the end..”

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

“what you have to decide, is how you want your life to be. if your forever was ending tomorrow, would this b the way you'd want to have spent it?”

“I'd wanted a real kiss, something to remember, but i'd long ago learned not to be picky with farewells. They weren't guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a goodbye at all.”

“Sometimes things don't turn out the way you want them to, Haven. Sometimes the people you choose to believe are wrong.”

“…You don’t want the best of times to be just one thing, forever. You have to have a lot of bests of times, each one topping the last. You know?”

“… You can't unlearn something, even if you want to. You know what you know.”

“It's not always so simple, Haven. Sometimes there isn't a good guy and a bad guy. Sometimes even the ones you want to believe turn out to be liars.”

“Well," I said finally, knowing he was waiting, "you make me laugh."
He nodded. "And?"
"You're pretty good-looking."
"Pretty good-looking? I called you beautiful."
"You want to be beautiful?" I asked him.
"Are you saying I'm not?”

“My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest. page 40000”

“You want me to give her a key?" the guy asked.
"I want you to give her a possibility," she told him, looking at my necklace again. "And that's what a key represents. An open door, a chance. You know?”

“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.”

“Once I turned eighteen, I could cut myself off from everyone and finally get what I wanted, which was to be on my own, once and for all.

~Ruby, pg 38”

“As far as I was concerned, we'd come to a draw: I hadn't wanted to come, and she didn't want me to leave. We were even. But I knew my mother wouldn't see it that way. Lately, we didn't seem to see anything the same.”

“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 wanted to tell him so. Find the right words, string them together in the ideal way, knowing that here they would have the best chance of sounding perfect.”

“Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.”

“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.”