Sarah Dessen Quotes

My mother sent me to speech classes, but the other kids still teased me. I was shy. I stooped. Instead of talking, I kept journals. That's where my love of words comes from. I majored in journalism.

For me, 'Rent' was all about coming out of myself, finding out who I was, learning the power I could have as a performer.

Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.

I love the idea of a website/blog being a catalyst for propelling people out into the world, and I enjoy it most when people write me to say that their world looked or smelled or felt a little different because of something that I wrote.

I find teaching to be a great way to keep everything in perspective and to help give back. It's also a lot of fun and creatively invigorating.

Education is an act of love, and thus an act of courage

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact — everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

Part of teaching is helping people create themselves.

I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

Write. Write every day. Write honestly. Write something that doesn’t exist, and you wish did. Read. Learn. Study. Watch people. Listen to what they say, listen to how they say it and listen to what they do not say. Surprise yourself. Scare yourself.

You gotta live life before you can talk about it. Sometimes when things don't work out in life, they work out on stage.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Writing is a really good first step toward that goal of knowing yourself.

They change. They're different. There are no two alike, that's the miracle of it. But if they have something to teach the students. You can see them writing during the show.

Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plow. The trick is just to wake thmem up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music.

I don't think I'm as educated as Whoopi, so I'm lifting myself to her level. But you know, our view of the world, our view of what we can do, our sense of what it means to be here, are similar.

I've spent most of my life trying to wear a persona that didn't quite fit and when I started writing books, it was like finally becoming the right person.

I hope to continue writing. I hope to continue teaching.