Sarah Dessen Quotes

It is always awfully easy to say what she would have done after you haven’t done it

Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn't.

The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.

Unless you can change the past, you’re wasting the present on this guilt

Regret is a tricky word. Here's a big secret: nobody knows what wasn't.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense.

The best time is always yesterday.

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced - because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

Most people have the opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.

You cannot look back and think what if.

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.

If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?

Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they're over and done. Regretting the things you didn't do is tougher because they're still out there, haunting you with the what ifs.

I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

You can't dwell on what might have been...and it's not fair to condemn him for something he hasn't done.

It's kind of hard to ask a dead guy what he did wrong.

It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.

You always think "woulda, coulda, shoulda." I wish that I had prosecuted Tot Mom, I wish I'd prosecuted OJ, and I wish I had prosecuted the JonBenet Ramsey case.

I'll never forgive myself. We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out.

Blaming things on the past does not make them better.

We could have had it all...

Not One Tiny Slice of that Guilt will Do Anything to Change a Single Thing in the Past

There are times when I wish I could go back and change the course of my life. Make different choices...But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on. Do you remember that I told you that at Spence?