Sarah Dessen Quotes

I believe we are more a product of our homes than of any other single influence.

In a movie, a book, or a play, a character doesn't live in a vacuum. She is subject to pressures from the world outside of her, just like we are in life. These pressures and circumstances shape character. Who your parents are determines your genetic make up: your skin color, your sex, your height, weight. Where you are raised does affect your worldview either positively or negatively, your accent. Your economic class affects where you go to school, what you eat, where you sleep.

Children accept their world as the world. I grew up like kids that I went to school with. Their parents were either shrinks or actors.

I was always a big reader, mostly because my parents were.

I grew up in a family of people who were obsessed with fashion.

Families are endlessly fascinating. We all have one, and they have a great impact on who we are and what we do - Freudian as that is.

I grew up in a rural area, I was from kind of a poor family and my parents weren't showbiz people. But going back was strange, and perhaps stranger for the other students.

I genuinely haven't really had a rebellious phase. I think it's just because of the way I was brought up. I think it's because I left home when I was ten years old.

I think my parents undoubtedly influenced me on some level.

Bad influences and distractions were around every corner. But I also learned that my neighborhood could be a nurturing, positive place to grow up.

A lot of things come down to your roots and how you're brought up.

You're molded by the period you were brought up in.

I think the way I approach things has something to do with growing up and seeing my parents go to work every day.

I think it's a combination of my peoples that I grew up under, places that I hung out is what contributed to where I'm at now.

When I search myself carefully I do think it's from my mother. I even feel strange saying that. Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things. But certainly influences early on that I felt from my mother. I wouldn't say she was "political" per se; she was sensitive to other people.

I think I have a finely tuned sense of humor. I think just being around it and growing up in it... my dad and Mel Brooks and Norman Lear. These are the people I grew up around.

I think spending a lot of time with my mom, who's a talker and a storyteller, and my dad, who has kind of a soft-spoken, understated sense of humor, I think that's how I became what I am, which is sort of an understated storyteller.

Between the two [parents], it was a really unique upbringing, I think, especially for where I was from.

The child is thinking and receiving vibrational thought from you on the day that he enters your environment. That is the reason that beliefs are transmitted so easily from parent to child.

But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.

First, I wanted to answer the question I'm most frequently asked: "How did you become who you are?" Well, you had to know John and Angelena Rice.

Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama - his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence - these came from Kansas, not Kenya.

I think we've all experienced sort of becoming who we are as a reaction to what we come from.

I think so much of what informs us as performers is what we had to endure as kids growing up. I was the youngest in my family. I always got a lot of attention.

I grew up with a good set of values, but it was never too strict. I was always encouraged to be a free-thinking individual.