Sarah Dessen Quotes

What can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli.

Stats are something which can't define everything. It could be hiding more things than it shows.

We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand

Journalism is always the art of the incomplete. You get bits and pieces.

To be honest, you don't get the full picture when you read a script.

If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

I think the intelligent thing about it is that you have to carefully listen to it all to grasp it, and because I'm not in every scene - colossal disappointment to everybody that it may be - I'm not getting the full picture here today while recording it.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

The fact that television and tourism have made the whole world accessible has created the illusion that we enjoy intimate knowledge of other places, when we barely scratch their surface. For the vast majority, the knowledge of Thailand or Sri Lanka acquired through tourism consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach.

I have my opinions about the way my father was. But they are my opinions, not necessarily the truth, and they are certainly not the whole spectrum of what this man was going through. It's my young, selfish interpretation of that person.

It is better to be ignorant than to half know something.

He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.

Knowing about authors' beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you've got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

Maybe the real subject of every interview is how you really can't learn much of anything about anyone from an interview.

Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines.

All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.

Usually as humans and especially as a man, we look at things in context. It's like, oh, I know what that is, that's this, or this, there's that.

That said, be mindful, to someone who's never seen any of my work, it's just a movie with actors. So it's only those who of course know the earlier work that will see something is afoot, so to speak. But I don't want to intellectualize.

When I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster...I learned nothing but the glow that wrapped her face when the soup came. That's the story.

Read between the lines, folks, 'cause I'm here to tell you you're not getting the straight story. Ever. You're getting variations of the truth, if you're lucky.

Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned.

When you look at the piece of paper, and there's just words on there, you interpret it as the actor to whatever you think is right. There may not be the hidden meaning behind the dialogue, because you don't really get to see what's going on.

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.