Zarr Quotes

#1. I love Chris Crutcher, Sara Zarr, Lois Lowry, Elizabeth Scott, Madeleine L'Engle, Gordon Korman, Michelle Magorian, Heather Bouwman.

Lisa McMann

#2. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#4. He said I didn't need to save him."
"But you want to."
"Yeah. But I can't. Right?"
"Probably not. Usually not.

Sara Zarr

#5. 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.

Sara Zarr

#6. 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.

Sara Zarr

#7. Sometimes trust isn't something you can just choose to do even if it makes sense. All my life the only reliable person, the one I could count on, the one who hasn't abandoned me, is me.

Sara Zarr

#8. As much I love to imagine being alone in an orderly lab, I also know you can't stay in there forever and expect to do good work. Life is one of those experiments meant to be conducted in a stimulating, messy environment.

Sara Zarr

#9. My whole life has been one big broken promise.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#11. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#13. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#15. 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.

Sara Zarr

#16. I have no desire to go back to San Francisco.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#18. 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.

Sara Zarr

#19. Life doesn't have to be only anxiety about what's gone wrong, and complaints about the world around you.

Sara Zarr

#20. 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.

Sara Zarr

#21. 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.

Sara Zarr

#22. Try a little tenderness ...

Sara Zarr

#23. 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.

Sara Zarr

#24. 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.

Sara Zarr

#25. You don't get anything without giving up something.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#27. 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.

Sara Zarr

#28. What did it feel like, I wondered, to be kissed like that right out in public? Not like some passionate tongue-wrestling thing, just a kiss to declare: We are each other's. I'd never been kissed like that, not by him or anyone else. No one had declared me his, not for the whole world to see, anyway.

Sara Zarr

#29. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#31. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#33. It's like a Venn diagram of tragedy.

Sara Zarr

#34. Because love, love never finishes.

Sara Zarr

#35. 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?

Sara Zarr

#36. 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.

Sara Zarr

#37. This was why Mom had told me to keep an eye on her. As tough as Dixie was, when it came to Dad she was a regular girl who wanted her father to love her. So

Sara Zarr

#38. I should have shouted and wave my hands in case the driver looked back, but mostly in life I don't protest things. I go along, or at least I make people believe I'm going along. Sometimes it's better if people think you're dumb or don't care.

Sara Zarr

#39. 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?

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#41. 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.

Sara Zarr

#42. Live in the present. Take care of the relationships in front of you now. Most friendships have a natural life, and when they've lived that out, you'll know.

Sara Zarr

#43. 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.

Sara Zarr

#44. Some people come into your life and leave a mark.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#46. You were never what I wanted to forget.

Sara Zarr

#47. 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.

Sara Zarr

#48. Is that the destiny of all friendships, no matter how good they are? To die out or fade away? To end?

Sara Zarr

#49. 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.

Sara Zarr

#50. 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.

Sara Zarr

#51. You are beautiful, Lucy. Inside and out. And that hurts, too. It hurts more specifically. More personally.

Sara Zarr

#52. 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.

Sara Zarr

#53. Okay, then, what was he like? Just give me something to go on so that I have a shot at him!'
'A shot at him? Are you on an elk hunt?

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#55. When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.

Sara Zarr

#56. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#58. Was it only because he happened to be the one who came along when he did? Could it have been anyone? Or was there something about him, that I liked and cared at?

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#62. 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.

Sara Zarr

#63. don't mistake a new place for a new you.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#65. Das wird sich alles finden.
Everything will be okay.

Sara Zarr

#66. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#68. I can be human to strangers and coworkers, just not to the people who actually care about me.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#70. 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.

Sara Zarr

#71. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#74. 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.

Sara Zarr

#75. 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.

Sara Zarr

#76. That's what music did. It made you feel.
...
Music, her grandfather always told her, was language. A special language, a gift from the Muses, something all people are born understanding but few people can thoroughly translate.

Sara Zarr

#77. 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.

Sara Zarr

#78. 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.

Sara Zarr

#79. 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.

Sara Zarr

#80. 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.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#82. 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.

Sara Zarr

#83. 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.

Sara Zarr

#84. I didn't say it didn't feel good..." They never tell you this part in sex ed, how to talk about what you did and why you did it and what you thought about it, before, during, and after.

Sara Zarr

#85. 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.

Sara Zarr

#86. 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.

Sara Zarr

#87. 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.

Sara Zarr

#88. What brings two people together anyway?

Sara Zarr

#89. 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.

Sara Zarr

#90. 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.

Sara Zarr

#91. Only, don't mistake a new place for a new you. I've done that more than once. You asked me before why I stay here. Maybe that's why," he said, "now that I think about it. Might as well deal with myself right here. It's as good a place as any.

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#93. counted because things in my life had a way of disappearing on me, and I'd learned not to trust what I thought was there. What

Sara Zarr

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

Sara Zarr

#95. 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.

Sara Zarr

#96. 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.

Sara Zarr

#97. 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.

Sara Zarr

#98. Love is just a word we use to describe what boils down to a selfish and temporary state of happiness.

Sara Zarr

#99. 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.

Sara Zarr

#100. 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.

Sara Zarr