Sara Zarr Quotes - Page 3

I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.

I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.

My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.

I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi's 'Winter' and being so overwhelmed with emotion.

I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.

I'm remembering how this works. How life doesn't have to be only anxiety about what's gone wrong or could go worng, and complaints about the world around you. How a person you're excited about can remind you there's stuff going on beyond... routine oil changes and homework. Stuff that matters. Stuff to look forward to.

It's not words, so much, just my mind going blank and thoughts reaching up up up, me wishing I could climb through the ceiling and over the stars until I can find God, really see God, and know once and for all that everything I've believed my whole life is true, and real. Or, not even everything. Not even half. Just the part about someone or something bigger than us who doesn't lose track. I want to believe the stories, that there really is someone who would search the whole mountainside just to find that one lost thing that he loves, and bring it home.

I don’t want these memories to become slippery, to just disappear into the thin air of life the way most things seem to. I want them to stick – even the bad ones – so I repeat them often.

The importance of our connection, what it meant to find each other again, the way it made what happened to us and between us not be a waste, not be for nothing. He would know, he had to know, that not saying good-bye would be the worst end of all.

I tried his cell over and over but he never answered. Then I’d call just to hear his voice on the outgoing message, until eventually that was gone too.

we had each other. I never needed anyone else. That’s the difference between you and me. You need all these people around you. Your friends, your boyfriend, everyone. Every single person has to like you. I only ever needed one person. Only ever needed you.

This was a memory I wanted to keep, whole, and recall again and again. When I was fifty years old I wanted to remember this moment on the porch, holding hands with Cameron while he shared himself with me. I didn’t want it to be something on the fringes of my memory like so many other things about Cameron and myself.

Ethan couldn’t possibly understand it, what Cameron and I meant to each other and how different it was from anything like a romance or a crush.

I lived too much in my head instead of the real world.

The one thing that could never die or be buried was my loyalty to Cameron for everything he’d done for me and what we’d been through together, even if that loyalty was a ghost.

the past only had whatever power you gave it; life was what you made it and if you wanted something different from what you had, it was up to you to make it happen.

Other memories stick, no matter how much you wish they wouldn’t. They’re like a song you hate but can’t ever get completely out of your head, and this song becomes the background noise of your entire life, snippets of lyrics and lines of music floating up and then receding, a crazy kind of tide that never stops.

Remember that no matter where I am or what I'm doing I've got a special place inside me that's all for you. It's been there since the day we met.

I looked at my hand resting on the shelf of the prop cabinet, thinking of the scars that were there whether anyone could see them or not.

It's like a Venn diagram of tragedy.

We'd need a miracle," he says. "A real one. Do you think those happen anymore?

I know I shouldn't say this—I know it as surely as I know the earth is round and beats are evil—and yet here it comes: “It's not too late to change your mind.

I don't yell back at my mother. When I'm angry or scared or upset, I don't yell. I stay quiet. I've seen how she is, how she would get with Kent and with me and with other people, life if someone at the pharmacy got in the wrong line or asked too long a question, or if someone on the bus accidentally bumped her. I've watched her my whole life, the way people react to her. It doesn't actually help you get what you want, yelling and being like that. It only makes people think bad of you.

the mark we've left on each other is the color and shape of love. That's the unfinished business between us. because love, love is never finished.

He felt it too, the air between us, the invisible lines that something or someone had drawn to connect us. That's the way I remember it.