Sarah Dessen Quotes

A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.

If you just focus on the smallest details, you never get the big picture right.

I'm interested in the way major events don't necessarily announce themselves as major events. They're often little things - the drip, drip of life that changes people or affects people.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow.

It is remarkable how a seemingly insignificant action or event can change entire lives.

Do not get so concerned with making a living that you forget to make a life.

A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature.

History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane.

Cumulatively small decisions, choices, actions, make a very big difference.

It's exciting for me to see [Laura Bush] busy and out there enjoying what she's doing. But we always make time to be with each other as well.

...in life it is often the tiny details that end up being the most important.

In war, important events result from trivial causes.

Balance is always tough with the kind of shows and my work ethic and all of that, but that definitely helps me do what I do in the big picture.

Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.

Greatness is a lot of small things done well, stacked up on each other.

If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.

You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only.

We try to stress the little things because little things lead to big things.

It takes so little to change everything. If you really thought about it, it would scare you to death.

Human life very much resembles a game of chess: for, as in the latter, while a gamester is too attentive to secure himself very strongly on one side of the board, he is apt to leave an unguarded opening on the other, so doth it often happen in life.

It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.

Certain people have said that the world is like a calm pond, and that anytime a person does even the smallest thing, it is as if a stone has dropped into the pond, spreading circles of ripples further and further out, until the entire world has been changed by one tiny action.

‎Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail. Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.