Sarah Dessen Quotes

Help the man-in-the-street make sense of the bewildering.

All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.

We do not know a truth without knowing its cause.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me understand something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

Happy is the one who knows the causes of things.

I can explain this to you, but I cannot comprehend it for you.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.

Maybe I'm just a slow learner or something, but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible.

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

Transparency doesn't mean much if the consumer doesn't understand what they're looking at.

I want people to make sense of what I'm talking about.

I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.

Science is not the means by which we come to understand why physical laws and circumstances are the way they are. When we ask why - assuming the question is really 'why' and not 'how' - we are really asking to know the motive of some responsible agent capable of reason.

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

If I wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better.

If you can't summarize an issue on one page, you don't understand the issue well enough.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.

To know truly is to know by causes.

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

The more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.