Sarah Dessen Quotes

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.

I, like many people, have had bumps in the road when it comes to family. Family dynamics are complicated and weigh heavily on me.

No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy.

My mother's life was way too heavy for me.

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.

How long have you been holding those words in your head, hoping to use them?

But the heaviest things, I think, are the secrets. They can drown you if you let them.

... one's own faults are always a heavy chain to drag through life and one can't help groaning under the weight now and then.

Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?

A thousand times today I've started to open my mouth, started to squeak out, "Can you tell me...? But then I'd look into the front seat, at my mother's silent shaking, my father's grim profile, the mournful bags under his eyes, and all the questions I might ask seemed abusive. Assault and battery, a question mark used like a club. My parents are old and fragile. I'd have to heartless to want to hurt them.

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

Will holding a secret in your heart make it any less true? If you never tell, never speak of it, will it become only a dream, less than a dream, a nightmare half-remembered? Oh, if only the gods would be so good. (Catelyn)

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

[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?

He was right – she was beating herself up about hurting his feelings. The girl was a classic martyr. She’d totally been born in the wrong century. She should have lived back when she could have gotten herself fed to some lions for a good cause.

I was a poor kid, and my mom was a single mother of three.

My mother became much older when I came out (ed's note: of detention). She had problems with her hearing and high blood pressure. But they still support me.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.

It was much easier for me to endure the belittling than it was to watch my dad get belittled.

The boy I just kissed is talking to my father. The boy I want to kiss again is waiting for my mother to serve pancakes. I must fight the urge to freak.

My mother loved my father. From my view, she let him get away with too much. It broke my heart to see him in an old people's home and stop being strong and lose his voice.

I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.

Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing.

We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.