Sarah Dessen Quotes

When I left for college, I told myself that this was a chance for reinvention. No one on the other side of the country knew that I was an introvert, so maybe if I tried not acting like an introvert, I wouldn't be one.

I just decided I wanted to become someone else... So I became someone else.

Somehow, when you think about yourself in old age, you think you're going to be this completely different person that you don't even recognize - because you can't imagine it, you know?

I never liked the name Eldred. Since nobody knew me in New York, I just changed to my middle name.

L.A. is a place people come to for all sorts of reasons, often to reinvent themselves, and that fascinates me.

I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier.

I changed my name when I was 13. I don't know why but it made sense at the time. I wanted another identity. I wanted to reinvent myself.

I had no real education because I was in and out of schools so I decided that I would completely change my look, change my image, change my name and move to New York.

I've become someone else, really, like a role model.

'Await Your Reply' by Dan Chaon. I've always been obsessed with the idea of disappearing and becoming someone else. Even if you don't share that obsession, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Gaga and Stefani are my nicknames. I guess when people meet me for the first time and call me Stefani, it bothers me. Because it's something that's reserved for only the people who are closest to me. It's not because I don't like my given name; it's that I became somebody else. I became somebody else for a reason, you know. This is part of what my message is - you can become whoever you want to be, to escape your past.

I am no longer Tris, the selfless, or Tris, the brave. I suppose that now, I must become more than either.

I used to be someone.

All I want is to become someone new. In this case, Tobias Johnson, son of Evelyn Johnson. Tobias Johnson may have lived a dull and empty life, but he is at least a whole person, not this fragment of a person that I am, too damaged by pain to become anything useful.

I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.

I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second place finishes left behind.

I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence.

I am not who I was, but I know who I am.

My past identity separates from me and remains in the past; he becomes someone else. Is memory really as insubstantial as the fragments of information that we store in our heads?

You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

I was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday; I am - what shall I say I am today?

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

I used to be somebody. Now I’m somebody else.