Sarah Dessen Quotes

However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.

I went through this delayed-adolescence thing. I didn't want to be tied down to a family.

I found the world extraordinarily strange, having first left home at 15.

I lived with my parents until I was 25.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

I have a daughter, she's twenty years old.

Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.

I was trying to learn how to deal with the freedom that I had away from home for the first time. 'Long Black Train,' the song and the album, are very special to me. It was just one of those things that I felt like God gave to me for a purpose, and I've been out here promoting that purpose.

I lived at home till I was 29.

They couldn't wait to get me out. My dad found my place, my mom helped me pack, and my brother was making architectural plans for my bedroom. It was just what you do at 18.

When I was 17, I decided I was going to leave home.

I've just grown up a lot and started to encounter some of the big decisions of life in terms of what career I wanted to do and figuring out personal relationships and things.

Part of the reason I sort of shot out like a cannon out of Michigan and left home at such an early age is because I had to feel independent.

You give up your childhood. You miss proms and games and high-school events, and people say it's awful... I say it was a good trade. You miss something but I think I gained more than I lost.

My plan growing up was to leave home and try not to panic. I always knew that to strive to be self-sufficient was an important ambition.

I love my parents. But I'm almost 28 and it's not fun to be asked, 'What are you doing today? What do you want for dinner? When are you going to be home?' It just makes you feel like a kid. It's this juxtaposition of feeling annoyed and really lucky to have people who love you so much.

When I moved out of my mom's house at 18 I was almost as sad to leave her sewing machine behind as anything else.

I was 28, and my mom was living with me. I had to decide. You have to claim it; you can't ask permission. After a gig in Singapore, she went home, I went to New York on my own, I packed her stuff in boxes and sent it home. I don't think she liked me for a while for doing that. It was something I needed to do to carve out my own space.

Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.

I think my parents had in mind that I would settle down at quite a young age, but I decided that being a housewife in a big country house wasn't for me. I wanted to leave the country, head for London and see what the world had to offer.

I left home when I turned 17 and ran away to New York. I did a lot of moving. I was based in New York and country-hopping, so I was always 'the new girl'.

I looked at my parents when I was 17, and I said, 'I'm moving to L.A.'

I understood the feeling of being 17 and living with your parents somewhere, and then being 18 and living in New York and having a city at your disposal.

My father was an amazing man. No person is perfect, and no father-son relationship is perfect. He wanted me to live my life my way and never think about what he would have done or what he would have wanted to do.

You grow up a certain way, and you make decisions within your family, but then you go to college, and the decisions become harder. You are away from home, from the influence of your parents, dealing with peer pressure. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in college.