Sarah Dessen

“I'd chosen instead to just change my route, gomiles out of the way, as ifavoiding it would make it go away once and for all.”

“The silence wasn'tlike the ones I'd knownlately, though: it wasn't empty as much as chosen. There's a entirely differentfeel to quiet when you'rewith some-one else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the differencebetween a pause and anending.”

“The way I see it," she continued, "is that some things are just meant to be theway they are.”

“The thing about Wes," Delia said to me, unwrapping another package ofturkey, "is that he thinks hecan fix anything. And if he can't fix it, he can at least do something with thepieces of what's broken.”

“Like life isn't complicated enough. You should at least be able tofollow the signs.”

“Now, see," Wes said, nodding at my plate, "this is going to blow your mind."I looked at him. "It's a waffle, not the second coming.”

“Why don't you ever wait a second and see what I'm planning, or thinking, before you burst in with your opinions and ideas? You never even give me a chance.”

“He wasn't what I'd thought he was; maybe he never had been. I wasn't what I'd thought I was, either.”

“Don't be a fool. Don't give up something important to hold onto someone who can't even say they love you.”

“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.”

“everyone is good at heart.”

“if i were a book i would be so open”

“Family,”_ _ _“They’re the people in your life you don’t getto pick. The ones that are given to you, as opposed to those you get tochoose.”

“I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be one of so many, to have not just parents and siblings but cousins and aunts and uncles, an entire tribe to claim as your own. Maybe you would feel lost in the crowd. Or sheltered by it. Whatever the case, one things was for sure: like it or not, you'd never be alone.”

“This was our common ground, the secret we shared but never spokealoud. I should have beenwith him; she should have left him alone. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easyin the past tense.”

“None of it meant anything, and all of it was important.”

“It was becoming clear to me that I shouldn't bother to get too attached to anything. Turn your back and you lose it. Just like that.”

“All I'd wanted for so long was for someone to explaineverything that hadhappened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to thisleads to this.”

“I've always known who I am. I might not work perfectly, or be like them, but that's okay. I know I work in my own way.”

“All the bitchy girls in the world are just a training ground for what men can do to you.”

“It's so, so stupid what we do to ourselves because we're afraid. It's so stupid.”

“Self respect, Colie. If you don't have it, the world will walk all over you.”

“Nothing like being scolded by a hippie.”

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

“As impossible, in fact, as keeping the moon...So I looked down the line at all my friends, knowing I would always remember this. And then I turned my gaze back up to the sky, and put my faith in that moon and its return.”

“Forever [is] so many different things. It is always changing... it is twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wish would last and last”

“It seemed safer to hold it in, where the only one who could judge was me.”

“I stood there for a moment, studying each of us, taking in Kirstens's smile, Whitney's haunting gaze, the way my mother cocked her head slightly to the side. When I got to my own face, I found myself staring at it, so bright, with dark all around it, like it was someone I didn't recognize. Like a word on a page that you've printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign, and you feel scared for a second, like you've lost something, even if you're not sure what it is.”

“It's a big deal when you finally get the chance to do the one thing you want to do -need to do- more than anything. It can kind of scare the crap out of you.”

“You really get to meet people on such a personal level. There's a real bonding in someone beating the crap out of you.”

“Being nice was the ideal, the one place where people didn't get loud, or so quiet they could scare you. If you could just be nice, then you wouldn't have to worry about arguments at all. But being nice wasn't as easy as it seemed, especially when the rest of the world could be so mean.”

“I mean, at first, it was kind of disappointing. But people recover from disappointment. Otherwise we'd all be hanging from nooses. Right?”

“Look at it this way: I might be saying you're fat, but at least I'm not punching you in the face.'Are those the only options?'Not always. Just sometimes.”

“That was the thing about being on the inside: the world was just going on, even when it seemed like time for you had stopped for good.”

“Nah," I said. "But if it does, just tell him I said to get back on the bike.""What?""He'll understand.”

“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.”

“I am still the center sister. But I see it differently now. There has to be a middle. Without it, nothing can truly be whole. Because it is not just the space between, but also what holds everything together.”

“It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.”

“the truth about forever is that it is happening right now”

“Can she be divorced?" I asked. "And famous for her commercialsand ideas?"She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckledface so solemn, as ifshe knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.”

“I am the middle sister. The one in between. Not oldest, not youngest, not boldest, not nicest. I am the shade of gray, the glass half empty or full, depending on your view. In my life, there has been little that I have done first or better than the one preceding or following me. Of all of us, though, I am the only one who has been broken.”

“Family," she announced. "They're the people in your life you don't get to pick. The ones that are given to you,as opposed to those you get to choose.""You're bound to them by blood," she continued, her voice flat. "Which, you know, gives you that much more in common. Diseases, genetics, hair, and eye color. It's like they're part of your blueprint. If something's wrong with you, you can usually trace it back to them."I nodded and kept writing."But," she said, "even though you're stuck with them, at the same time, they're also stuck with you. So that's why they always get the front rows at christenings and funerals. Because they're the ones that are there, you know, from the beginning to the end. Like it or not.”

“That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened-good, bad, or anywhere in between-it was always, if nothing else, all your own.”

“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.”

“You just walk over there and into the office and say, 'Hey, be my prom date,'" he said. "It's that simple.”

“No, no, no to Tallyho.”

“It was terrible and awful when someone left you. You could move on, do the best you could, but like Eli had said, an ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have to have the last word.”

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

“What," I said, "is that a crime here or something? Like only buying one thing at the Gas/Gro?”

“She's a baby," Maggie told me. "Babies wear pastels.""Says who?" I asked. ... "Society. The same society, I might add, that dictates that little girls should always be sugar and spice and everything nice, which engourages them to not be assertive. And that, in turn, then leads to low self-esteem, which can lead to eating disorders and increased tolerance and acceptance of domestic, sexual, and substance abuse.”