It’s so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself.

—Sarah Dessen in Dreamland

About Sarah Dessen

Portrait of Sarah Dessen

Sarah Dessen (born June 6, 1970) is an American novelist known for her contributions to young adult fiction. Her first book, That Summer, was published in 1996, and has since published more than a dozen other novels and novellas. In 2017, Dessen won the Margaret Edwards Award for some of...

More quotations from Sarah Dessen

Strange how you could barely know a person and they were still able to bring out the worst in you.

—Sarah Dessen in Once and for All

All anyone really wants from another person is their attention. It's so easy to give and counts for so much.

—Sarah Dessen in Once and for All

And now, as I reached up, closing my fingers over his, I was grateful more than ever for something, finally, to hold on to.

—Sarah Dessen in Just Listen

He's just not a keeper. He's not worth working my schedule around if we're only going to break up in a few weeks anyway.

—Sarah Dessen in This Lullaby

It was just one boy, that same boy I always started to think about more and more as the hours passed.

—Sarah Dessen in Along for the Ride

More quotations tagged with “expectations”

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

—Benjamin Disraeli

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How disappointing when people succumb to what is expected of them.

—Lauren Groff in Arcadia

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I used to think that any man of mine had to live up to a list of my expectations. I was wrong. Love has no list.

—Rachel Gibson in Any Man of Mine

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The thing about surviving something truly tragic is that it changes your expectations forever. You make do with very little. You're grateful for crumbs. You make the best of small mercies. You endure large trials. You understand that life owes you nothing. You expect nothing, and when something wonderful happens, you don't trust it.

—Katy Regnery

gratitude expectations survival trust tragedy mercy

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

—Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk

life expectations loss absence memories

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30 Aug 2013 Added