Sarah Dessen Quotes

The trauma of the whole thing has been humbling, and for the first time, I'm a little bit wobbly.

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

The problem with heartbreak is that nobody can help you when you're heartbroken. Nobody and nothing. Not the films you watch alone desperately searching for a character who feels the way you do, not the glasses or bottles of whisky you keep by your bed and certainly not Instagram.

My heart's been torn wide open, just like I feared it would be, and I have no willpower to close it back up.

I hate the way, once you start to know someone, care about them, their behavior can distress you, even when it's unreasonable and not your fault, even if you were really trying to be careful, tactful.

God, I feel like hell tonight. Tears of rage I cannot fight. I'd be the last to help you understand... Nothing's true and nothing's right so let me be alone tonight 'cause you can't change the way I am... I have a face I cannot show, I make the rules up as I go. It's try and love me if you can. Are you strong enough to be my man? When I've shown you that I just don't care, when I'm throwing punches in the air, when I'm broken down and I can't stand will you be man enough to be my man?

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

It's okay not to be okay... Sometimes it's hard, to follow your heart but tears don't mean you're losing, everybody's bruising, there's nothing wrong with who you are.

It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

Why must I feel like that? Why must I chase the cat?

I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right.

I can hear my brother's voice in my head. Your problem is that you're too emotional. But how can I not be emotional, Rowan? How can I not care?

Some emotions cannot be endured with a golf club in your hands.

All through the night, she battled herself. Or battled to know herself. She fell apart and then put herself back together and then she fell apart again and put herself back together, over and over.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens - but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

When you're too mad and too rattled to see straight, you're bound to make mistakes. You can't go on and on for years being miserable about a situation and not have it change you. You get so you can't stand yourself.

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.

Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else.

I'm really happy with my life now, but there's a lot of stuff I feel very sad about in ways I can't even control.

Love can really screw you up before you learn to live with it.