Sarah Dessen Quotes

There was a certain power beautiful mothers held over their less beautiful daughters.

My father was extremely loving to me and funny and wise and understanding, and at other times extremely demanding, critical, calculating, exacting. When you're a young woman, I think you want to please a lot, so maybe you accept more of the criticism than you would as an older person. But criticism can be very wounding. It certainly was to me.

Everybody thinks I'm the weirdo in the family.

I think our family is like a lot of families. We had no vocabulary for mental illness

Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant.

I think the relationship between mother and daughter is so interesting, even in a semi-normal family. Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke's family relationship is going to be so interesting to explore. It is going to give me so many places to go. Obviously, it has been said that she is not the most stable of characters. What is interesting about that, when you think about mental health, is that young women will often come into those problems and difficulties in their 20's, so it is very possible that this will start to affect her psyche.

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

I related so much to the responsibility of being a parent, the responsibility of "did you screw your kid up," the responsibility of letting your own parents down.

My mother won't admit it, but I've always been a disappointment to her. Deep down inside, she'll never forgive herself for giving birth to a daughter who refuses to launder aluminium foil and use it over again.

I went to bed feeling melancholy, wishing I could have poured out all my fears and insecurities to my mom. Wasn’t that what normal mothers and daughters did?

An undutiful daughter will prove an unmanageable wife.

I'm in a different chapter of my life. As time goes by and I grow older, I find that I need to just be quiet and think. There have been periods when I've locked myself away for days, but now it's different - I'm married and we have a daughter who is in my office the whole time.

No one wanted that marriage, no one. Even Mahatma Gandhi wasn't happy about it. As for my father...it's not true that he opposed it, as people say, but he wasn't eager for it. I suppose because the fathers of only daughters would prefer to see them get married as late as possible.

I'm real ambivalent about [working mothers]. Those of use who have been in the women's movement for a long time know that we've talked a good game of "go out and fulfill your dreams" and "be everything you were meant to be." But by the same token, we want daughters-in-law who are going to stay home and raise our grandchildren.

I think I know what it's like to have a family that the outside world sees as peculiar or lacking.

I think there's a tremendous amount of guilt that goes on between mothers and daughters, no matter how good or bad their relationships are. It kills girls inside when they think they're letting their mothers down.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

I think it's very hard to go into the same business as your family when you're an artist.

[Christmas] holidays are a heavy, heavy time. We make light of them with our red and green and our stockings and candy canes, but people think heavy thoughts over the holidays because that's when you're thinking about family. Are we close? Or are we not as close as other people?

How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.

Sometimes I'm afraid that my daughter might think that I get my hair done for a living.

Emily and I have some funny scenes where we quarrel and it gets quite heated, the mother-daughter relationship. You know, film mothers and daughters adore each other. And some don't. But how could you not love Emily Blunt? But I think I'm just one of those people who's always discontented.

I want my mother to think - she's a tough fashion critic.

I feel now like a hinge between generations, which is strange. It just happened recently. I think it's because my daughter is so much like me at her age. I feel like I'm reliving my own mother's experience of raising me.

I'm in the middle of just trying to impress my nieces, who think I work for the bus company because they saw a picture of me on a bus. I did an independent movie with Mark Pellington (I Melt with You), and then tried to impress my nieces again, by starring opposite Miley Cyrus (in So Undercover). So, basically I'm just trying to get some respect from my family.