Sarah Dessen Quotes

That parasite: the past.

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?

We all look for lost time.

People look to you to replace a part in their lives that they can't get back. You can't get the past back, you can't do it. We've all tried.

The moon I see now is the same moon I saw before. Except that before, when I looked at it, it was in anticipation of what it would be like when I got there. That's behind me now.

The best years are behind me.

There's no sustenance in the past.

I only felt a cold wind blow while I tried to hang on to the past.

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

For the first time in a long time, he didn't think of the past. And of all the things he'd lost. He thought only of the present, and what he had. And how it was so much more than he deserved. And he prayed then that he would never, ever lose it.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

I was right when I said I'd never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can't ever do anything else except look back.

It's easy to get buried in the past when you try to make a good thing last.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

The past is a sorry country.

I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place. But standing there alone on the landing, I thought of Grandma Halley and how she'd held me close against her lap as we watched the sky together. I'd always thought I couldn't remember, but suddenly in that moment, I closed my eyes and saw the comet, finally, brilliant and impossible, stretching above me across the sky.

I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.

Dwelling in the past prevents doing something in the present.

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?