Sarah Addison Allen Quotes

It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.

Sometimes you weren't supposed to share pain. Sometimes it was best just to deal with it alone.

Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it right.

Books can be possessive, can't they? You're walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved there on its own, just to get your attention. Sometimes what's inside will change your life, but sometimes you don't even have to read it. Sometimes it's a comfort just to have a book around. Many of these books haven't even had their spines cracked. 'Why do you buy books you don't even read?' our daughter asks us. That's like asking someone who lives alone why they bought a cat. For company, of course.

Every life needs a little space. It leaves room for good things to enter it.

Fate never promises to tell you everything up front. You aren't always shown the path in life you're supposed to take. But if there was one thing she'd learned in the past few weeks, it was that sometimes, when you're really lucky, you meet someone with a map.

Don't let anyone see your vulnerable spots. Once they knew how to hurt you, they would do it again and again.

I just don't know where home is. There's this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it's like chasing the moon - just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon. I grieve and try to move on, but then the damn thing comes back the next night, giving me hope of catching it all over again.

We're connected, as women. It's like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there's trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we're just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don't help each other, who will?

I needed to stop being what everyone thought I was.

Coffee, she'd discovered, was tied to all sorts of memories, different for each person. Sunday mornings, friendly get-togethers, a favorite grandfather long since gone, the AA meeting that saved their life. Coffee meant something to people. Most found their lives were miserable without it. Coffee was a lot like love that way. And because Rachel believed in love, she believed in coffee, too.

The next morning dawned bright and sweet, like ribbon candy.

Embarrassment felt a lot like eating chili peppers. It burned in the back of your throat and there was nothing you could do to make it go away. You just had to take it, suffer from it, until it eased off.

Your peers when you're a teenager will always be the keepers of your embarrassment and regret. It was one of life's great injustices, that you can move on and be accomplished and happy, but the moment you see someone from high school you immediately become the person you were then, not the person you are now.

She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches.

She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened.

But relying on one person for your every need is so dangerous. One set of hands isn't enough to keep you from falling.

You can't change where you come from, but you can change where you go from here. Just like a book. If you don't like the ending, you make up a new one.

Don't you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?

I think Heaven will be like a first kiss.

She never thought she was good at making friends. But maybe she was just trying to be friends with the wrong people.

When you're a teenager, your friends are your life. When you grow up, friendships seem to get pushed further and further back, until it seems like a luxury, a frivolity, like a bubble bath.

It was like the way you wanted sunshine on Saturdays, or pancakes for breakfast. They just made you feel good.

Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people's legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.

Crystalline swirls of sugar and flour still lingered in the air like kite tails.

You'd be surprised how easy some things can be, things you never thought you'd do, when you take self-respect out of the equation.

My favorite books are the ones that make me smile for hours after reading them. I want that for my readers, for the sweetness to linger. Sort of like chocolate, but without the calories

Willa?" "Yes" "It's morning and I still love you.

Memories, even hard memories, grew soft like peaches as they grow older.

After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change the end.

No one should ever compromise the dignity of another human being.

How we see the world changes all the time. It all depends on our mood.

There was a mood of magic and frenzy to the room. Crystalline swirls of sugar and flour still lingered in the air like kite tails. And then there was the smell-the smell of hope, the kind of smell that brought people home.

Right now everyone is drinking bad wine made of sour grapes and hysteria. Let them drink it, and let them regret it in the morning.

Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation.

Men. You can't live with them, you can't shoot them.

Misfits need a place to get away, too. All that trying to fit in is exhausting.

...a sad sort of vulnerability was wafting from her, making the night smell like maple syrup.

It was early evening when they walked outside, the sky the color of pink lemonade.

I lost myself trying to find happiness in things that didn't love me back.

It took me a long time to realize this: We get to choose what defines us.

Her life was monotonous, but it kept her out of trouble. . . . This, her father would say, was called being an adult.

Wasn't that the point to being married? That you had a partner, someone you trusted, to help with important decisions.

Some men you know are Southern before they ever say a word," Julia said as she and Emily watched Sawyer's progress, helpless, almost as if they couldn't look away. "They remind you of something good--picnics or carrying sparklers around at night. Southern men will hold doors open for you, they'll hold you after you yell at them, and they'll hold on to their pride no matter what. Be careful what they tell you, though. They have a way of making you believe anything, because they say it that way.

I spent so much time telling myself that this wasn't home that I started to believe it," she said carefully. "Belonging has always been tough for me." I can be your home," he said quietly. "Belong to me.

She sometimes thought she was going crazy. Her first thought when she woke up was always how to get him out of her thoughts. And she would keep watch, hoping to see him next door, while plotting ways to never have to see him again.

Living down your own past was hard enough. You shouldn't have to live down someone else's.

The words were strung in the air like garland. She could almost see them.

Blank-slate friendships were thin and temperamental. She knew that. There was no history there to cement people together, for better or worse.

She'd always known he didn't love her. But it was easier to bear when he didn't know she loved him. That way they were even. Now he knew he had all the power.