Sarah Dessen citations

Page 11

“On est tous quelqu'un en puissance.”

“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.”

“But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.”

“I'd come here planning to leave as soon as I could. It was a pit stop, not a destination. I had my whole life mapped out."
"So what happened?"
"I guess that map didn't turn out to be mine after all”

“I bet you can't eat ten bananas!"
"I bet you're right.”

“Fine just fine.”

“Sometimes, you get things right the first time. Others, the second. But the third time, they say, is the charm.”

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

“Really, it had been stupid to expect anything anyway. A few late nights does not a habit, or a relationship, make.”

“Let's just start and see what happens.”

“You didn't fail. You just opted out. There's a difference.”

“There's no shame in trying to make stuff work, is how I see it. It's better than just accepting the broken.”

“There was nothing, nothing to depend on. And why was I surprised?”

“Don't I know it.”

“…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?”

“But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.”

“I mean, to me, freaking out is different. More of a running away, not telling anyone what's wrong, slowly simmering until you burst kind of thing.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Maybe we were all destined to just keep doing the same stupid things, over and over again, never really learning a single thing.”

“But as long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endless potential.”

“The point,' Ms. Conyers continued, "is that no word had one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life.”

“Watching them, I thought again of how we can't expect everybody to be there for us, all at once. So it's a lucky thing that really, all you need is someone.”

“Because it is so hard, in any life, to believe in what you can’t fully understand.”

“This was how I was dealing with everyone and everything lately, taking the good when it came, and the bad the same way, knowing each would pass in its own time.”

“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.”

“Welcome to adulthood," she said. "It sucks as much as high school.”

“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.”

“This true difference in me now: I had these experiances, these tales, more of this life. So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.”