Sara Zarr Quotations

We write in ways that, we generally hope, reflect real life, or at least look familiar to humans. And in life, recurring themes are a recurring theme. We never quite conquer a pet vice or a relationship pattern or a communication habit. We're haunted by our particular demons.

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

I wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.

I don't like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.

There were about ten years of trying, failing, trying again, suffering rejection, etc. My first published book, 'Story of a Girl', was the fourth book I wrote.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

I have no desire to go back to San Francisco.

I always felt that church is where I'm going to find my community and people to live my life with.

Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.

The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

Family or love or romance, whatever it is, is not restricted to perfect people. If it were, it wouldn't exist. All of that comes out in my work in some way.

I do have a little bit more confidence in - or at least familiarity with - my process. For example, when it feels like it's going badly or that I'm lost, I know I'll eventually find my way because I've been through it before. But writing itself is still hard.

I'm always in a place that is sincere but conflicted about different things that come with being a Christian and being an active, churchgoing Christian.

Making lists of favorite things is, for me, a task ridden with anxiety. What if I've accidentally excluded something I love? What if I discover something new tomorrow that I love even more?

One of my favorite authors is Robert Cormier. He was a devout Catholic and a very nice man, which might not be the impression you get from reading his books.

When my characters are questioning things, it's not me leading up to an answer; it's me asking those same questions and letting the characters' lives unfold and seeing where it takes them.

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.

Everyone has an identity crisis when they are 16 or 17 years old.

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

I don't want to pretend like I'm some intellectual person who understands Flannery O'Connor.

I grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s. We were part of a church that belonged to the California Jesus movement.

I played the clarinet, and my sister played the violin... If we'd had the discipline and the passion, maybe we could have been good.

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

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

My first published book, Story of a Girl, was the fourth book I wrote.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I'm so focused on trying to craft the story that I'm in my own little world with it and that process. The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

When a young reader tells you that they'd never finished a book outside of school until they read yours, or that they really needed to hear something that one of your characters says or thinks... that's just rewarding and humbling.

Is it good, bad, or neutral to recognize thematic patterns in your own work? When it comes to recurring themes, I'm of the mind that knowledge is probably not power, at least in terms of the work.

I tend to describe recurring themes as being part of a writer's DNA - something so deeply embedded in us that even we don't notice it until we've written three or four books.

I get a message from my dad. In the mood I'm in, I tear up to see his name in my inbox, and imagine him down the hall in bed, propped on pillows, emailing me. "Hon,Enjoyed our gelato date the other night. I just want to say I'm proud of you for a lot of reasons. Also, I've attached a picture of my foot."He's such a weirdo goofball. I love him.

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

The world was full of beauty. She wanted to grab hold of it and take it down into her bones. Yet always it seemed beyond her grasp. Sometimes only by a little, like now. The thinnest membrane. Usually, though, by miles. She couldn’t expect to be that kind of happy all the time. She knew that. But sometimes you could. Sometimes you should be allowed a tiny bit of joy that should stay with you for more than five minutes. That wasn’t too much to ask. To have a moment like this, and be able to hold on to it. To cross that membrane, and feel alive.

It's as if once you hit high school, you're programmed, like a robot, to be an asshole to your parents.

My whole life has been one big broken promise.

don’t mistake a new place for a new you.

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'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.

I never had a connection like that to anyone, where every day you think about what you’ll tell them and you wonder what they’re doing, and you know they’re wondering what you’re doing.

It's a jagged thing in my throat, how much I miss her.

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.

Try a little tenderness ...

I'm still going to love you, always. And in the rock-paper-scissors of life, love is rock. fear, anger, everthing else...no contest.

Don't ask me how I am,' I blurt. 'Please.' I want to keep feeling good. Just because the lights are on doesn't mean I have to look.

Sitting and waiting for something to happen was the worst kind of torture.

And he left. I watched him walk out – he didn’t say good-bye, he didn’t even look back. It scared me, how easy it was for him to do that.

It came down to the smallest things, really, that a person could do to say I’m sorry, to say it’s okay, to say I forgive you. The tiniest of declarations that built, one on top of the other, until there was something solid beneath your feet. And then… and then. Who knew?

What brings two people together anyway?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 wonder how you're supposed to know the exact moment when there's no more hope.

It makes me think of Lazarus. He must have had those shadows after his miracle. You don't spend time in the tomb without it changing you, and everyone who was waiting for you to come out.

Katy skipped over, her low-rise jeans threatening to fall off her skinny hips. With some girls, that was a sexy look. With Katy, it made you nervous.

In a way, “failure” is just another word for “the journey,” for not being there yet but on the way. It’s the road we walk on to get wherever it is we’re trying to go.

No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.

Sometimes you want to hear your own mother's voice.

Sometimes you should have something you don't need but that you want.

Some people come into your life and leave a mark.

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.

The Lord doesn't give a person more than he knows they can bear.

It's hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn't start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.

My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With 'How to Save a Life', I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.

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.

There's a lot that is awful. That's the struggle of getting old. To make sure you don't let what's hard...obscure the beauty.

I played the clarinet, and my sister played the violin... If wed had the discipline and the passion, maybe we could have been good.

I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write.

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.

It's just so out of control. Life, I mean. The way it flies off in all these different directions without your permission.

Your greatest creation is your creative life. It's all in your hands. Rejection can't take it away; reviews can't take it away. The life you create for yourself as an artist, may be the only thing that's really yours. Create a life you can center yourself in calmly as you wait for your work to grow.

Life needed a fast forward button. Because there were days you just don't want to live through, not again, but they kept coming around and you were powerless to stop time or speed it up or do anything to keep from having to face it.

A know a place called New Beginnings, but I don't think it works quite like that. You can't just erase everything that came before.

Can it really be love if we don't talk that much, don't see each other? Isn't love something that happens between people who spend time together and know each other's faults and take care of each other?...In the end, I decide that the mark we've left on each other is the color and shape of love.

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.

Sometimes rescue comes to you. It just shows up, and you do nothing. Maybe you deserve it, maybe you don't. But be ready, when it comes, to decide if you will take the outstretched hand and let it pull you ashore.

Ethan and I are done," I said finally. "I'm sorry." "He was my first boyfriend." "I know." "The only real boyfriend I've had. I'm a senior in high school and he was my only real boyfriend." "I know." "And I won't find another one at Jones Hall. That is guaranteed." "Okay." "This is all very sad and tragic," I said. Alan unwrapped a sleeve of Smarties. "Yet, oddly, you don't seem that upset." "I know.

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.

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.

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.

I understand that you can never have the whole picture; inevitably, there’s stuff you don’t know, can’t know. But when it comes to Cameron I always want more than I have, would like to be able to take hold of at least one or two more pieces, if only because I’m convinced there are parts of myself inside them.

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.

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

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.

and i don't just mean that they change you. a lot of people can change you - the first kid who called you a name, the first teacher who said you were smart, the first person who crowned you best friend. it's the change you remember, the firsts and what they meant, not really the people......i'm talking about the ones who, for whatever reason, are as much a part of you has your own soul. their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business.

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.

You were never what I wanted to forget.

Because love, love is never finished. It circles and circles, the memories out of order and not always complete.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn’t control, full of surprises, and they weren’t always good. Life wasn’t what you made it. You were what life made you.

I had them all fooled into believing I was normal and well-adjusted, a rock of sensibility who could always be counted on to have a positive attitude.

Because love, love never finishes.

The kind of life I want is to be a person who would get a personal note every day.

That's how life feels to me. Everyone is doing it; everyone knows how. To live and be who they are and find a place, find a moment. I'm still waiting.

That's how you know you really trust someone, I think; when you don't have to talk all the time to make sure they still like you or prove that you have interesting stuff to say.

he's a story i want to know from page one

Forgetting isn't enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound.