Sarah Dessen Quotes

Some people who've read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that's the way it should be, because in real life two people can look at the same president and one will see a hero and the other a villain.

Different men often see the same subject in different lights

As far as I was concerned, we'd come to a draw: I hadn't wanted to come, and she didn't want me to leave. We were even. But I knew my mother wouldn't see it that way. Lately, we didn't seem to see anything the same.

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.

Just because you did not understand us, it did not mean we were wrong.

I told my wife she looks sexy with black fingernails. Now she thinks I slammed the car door on her hand on purpose.

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.

Yet it was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning.

One man's fish is another man's poisson.

She got really mad a month ago, because she had e-mailed me a naked picture of herself - which is a nice thing to do - but then I messed up, and I accidentally forwarded that e-mail to both of my parents. Now, my girlfriend is furious, mortified, but I don't even care, 'cause now I have to call up my mother and say 'Mom, I am so sorry - that picture was just for dad.'

Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It's not logical; it's psychological.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself

When you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that's much more interesting in the long run.

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?

I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

Our intentions tend to be much more real to us than our actions, and this can lead to a great deal of misunderstanding with other people, to whom our actions tend to be much more real than our intentions.

I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

How was I to know? ... You didn't say anything.""I said lots of things," he corrected gently. "You just didn't hear them.

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind.

What I call loaded, I'm not. What other people call loaded I am.