Sarah Addison Allen Quotes

I think Heaven will be like a first kiss.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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?

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

If a man has so much heat he burns your skin when he touches you, he's the devil. Run away

~ Sarah Addison Allen

People always say life is too short for regrets. But the truth is, it's too long.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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

~ Sarah Addison Allen

I needed to stop being what everyone thought I was.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Stability was overrated. Crises and adventures, on the other hand, could actually teach you something.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

A hummingbird cake, she decided as she turned on the kitchen light. It was made with bananas and pineapples and pecans and had a cream cheese frosting.She would make it light enough to float away.She reached over to open the window. To float to her daughter.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Did I ever tell you about the day I finally let go of him? That day that led me to you?

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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

~ Sarah Addison Allen

It felt as though they were the only people in the world, two young women about to bury the symbol of their helplessness, as if that's all it would take to make them whole again.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

But that would leave Paxton to fend for herself, and the last thing any woman wanted in this kind of situation was to look around and see all the people who could help her doing nothing.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

...Agatha had declared that her friendship to Georgie still existed, as if it was a living, breathing thing, something that came to life the moment it happened and didn't just go away because they no longer acknowledged it.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? Agatha would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

There was a strange but universal understanding among women. On some level all women knew, they all understood, the fear of being outnumbered, of being helpless. It throbbed in their chests when they thought about the times they left stores and were followed. The knocks on their car windows as they were sitting alone at red lights, and strangers asking for rides. Having too much to drink and losing their ability to be forceful enough to just say no. Smiling at strange men coming on to them, not wanting to hurt their feelings, not wanting to make a scene. All women remembered these things, even if they had never happened to them personally. It was a part of their collective unconscious.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Jack thought anyone who read couldn't be all that bad.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

The books I read when I was twenty completely changed when I read them when I was sixty.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

He didn't think he belonged here, so she was making him face some uncomfortable facts. People adapt. People change. You can grow where you're planted.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Under her thick pancake makeup, her skin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Under her thick pancake makeup, her sin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

To this day she could make tap water boil just by kissing him.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Yellow joy was radiating from her. When you're happy for yourself, it fills you. When you're happy for someone else, it pours over. It was almost too bright to watch.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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 can make up a new one.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

The word lethologica describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Love always hurts. That’s one thing I know you know. But it’s worth it. That’s what you don’t know. Yet.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

It was a remarkable realization to Eby, that we are what we're taught. That was why the Morris women were what they were. It was because they knew no different.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

He stared up at the moon, which looked like a giant hole in the sky, letting light through to the other side.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

But she stopped herself. That wouldn't make it right. You didn't forgive because it was the only choice you thought you had. That didn't make it forgiveness, that made it desperation. She'd always been too desperate about Jake. Always.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Eby knew all too well that there was a fine line when it came to grief. If you ignore it, it goes away, but then it always comes back when you least expect it. If you let it stay, if you make a place for it in your life, it gets too comfortable and it never leaves. It was best to treat grief like a guest. You acknowledge it, you cater to it, then you send it on its way.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

The air around her was cool lately, as if she were creating a vacuum with her unhappiness.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

She opened her eyes slowly and saw that a pale lavender moth had come to a rest on the back of her hand. She watched it from her pillow, wondering if it was real. It reminded her of her husband Matt's favorite T-shirt, which she'd hidden in a bag of sewing, unable to throw it away. It had a large faded moth on the front, the logo of a cover band out of Athens called the Mothballs.That T-shirt, that moth, always brought back a strange memory of when she was a child. She used to draw tattoos of butterflies on her arms with Magic Markers. She would give them names, talk to them, carefully fill in their colors when they started to fade. When the time came that they wanted to be set free, she would blow on them and they would come to life, peeling away from her skin and flying away.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

There was an art to the male posterior. That's all there was to it.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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

~ Sarah Addison Allen

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.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of sharp early November air that would have the town in a flurry of activity, anticipating the tourists the colder weather always brought to the high mountains of North Carolina. She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm.

~ Sarah Addison Allen