Sarah Dessen Quotes

We had lain together, skin on skin, been as close as two people could, and he was a stranger. He was that someone who you are afraid of as a child, stranger. They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.

I've often thought that my lack of intimacy with those around me is the fault of those around me.

I'm so used to being misunderstood.

No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

I have always been misunderstood.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand.

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

I don't know what she is now. A stranger, mostly. It's as if she has become a part of a different world, one that doesn't include me anymore.

Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger - a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...

Instead, we just sat there, together but really apart, watching a show about a stranger and all her secrets, while keeping our own to ourselves, as always.

I looked about for some of my acquaintance, but in vain, for I saw not one person that I knew, which is very odd, for all the world seemed there.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

I, measuring his affections by my own, Which then most sought where most might not be found, Being one too many by my weary self, Pursued my humor not pursuing his, And gladly shunned who gladly fled from me.

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.

All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another.

It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger.

Her face was a stranger’s face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to.

I know nothing. I know no one. I’m lonely. Every time I see you, you’ve put up some new wall, and you never let me in.

Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.