Top 252 Quotes & Sayings by Deb Caletti

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Deb Caletti.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Deb Caletti

Deb Caletti is an American writer of young adult and adult fiction. Caletti is a National Book Award finalist, and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book medalist, as well as the recipient of other numerous awards including the PEN USA finalist award, the Josette Frank Award for Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, and SLJ Best Book award. Caletti's books feature the Pacific Northwest, and her young adult work is popular for tackling difficult issues typically reserved for adult fiction. Her first adult fiction novel, He's Gone, was published by Random House in 2013, and was followed by several other books for adults, in addition to her many books for teens.

It's human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it's also arrogant.
I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods.
Often, marriage was solitude, with company. — © Deb Caletti
Often, marriage was solitude, with company.
I've never met a popcorn ball I didn't like.
Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.
I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power.
My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.
All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.
I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!
When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.
I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.
To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.
I long for books; I am utterly greedy about them.
I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.
'The Nature of Jade' is about a girl who works with the elephants at the zoo near her home, and who, through her involvement with them, becomes involved with a boy and his baby.
Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays. — © Deb Caletti
Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.
My most memorable teacher was Rich Campe, my third-grade teacher at Fairlands Elementary in Pleasanton, California.
You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.
If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.
I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.
All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.
I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.
Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.
When your arms are out wide, you'll capture love and joy and golden moments but other things, too. Mistrust will sneak in on a wave of that joy, and complications will ride the backs of the golden moments, and there will be both love and the risks of love. That's the way it is. That's the design.
Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving.
When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness.
Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.
One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library.
In a lifetime, the recipe always needs amending - more of this, a little less of that, what to do now that the cake has fallen.
Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.
When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.
I finally learned that it was all right to say something wasn’t working for me when it wasn’t working. The world doesn’t come crashing down when you speak the truth.
If fate is a shape-shifter, then loves is too. It can be, anyway, in its most dangerous form. It´s your best day and then your worst. It´s your most hope and then you most despair. Lightness, darkness, it can swing between extremes at lightning speed- a boat upon the water on the most dangerous day, and then the clouds crawl in and the sky turns black and the sea rages and the boat is lost.
...What is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it...it can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog, hidden behind a curve of roads and then suddenly there in full glory. It's waves come like breaths, in and out, body stretched to forever in it's possibilities, and yet it's heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic.
The scariest part of forever is that nothing is.
Rejection, though--it could make the loss of someone you weren't even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending.
To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery.
Family was even a bigger word than I imagined, wide and without limitations, if you allowed it, defying easy definition. You had family that was supposed to be family and wasn't, family that wasn't family but was, halves becoming whole, wholes splitting into two; it was possible to lack whole, honest love and connection from family in lead roles, yet to be filled to abundance by the unexpected supporting players.
People are secretive when they have secrets. — © Deb Caletti
People are secretive when they have secrets.
You've got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn't define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don't have to struggle to be good enough for.
This is what happens when nice people are pushed too far. We give too many chances, and so when we've finally had enough, we are well and truly done. When a nice person shuts a door on you, it's shut for good.
You've got to say what you mean and mean what you say...Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.
The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.
It’s a simple truth that a secret is something you’re ashamed of.
That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.
A new person in your life gives the rest of you a chance to be new, too. Your life can be whatever you want it to, from there on out. I leaned in and kissed and that is who I was to him, not shy, but bold. Not inhibited, but brave. I was that to him and so I kept being that. It was what I thought he wanted and what he was attracted to, and yet it was this, this exact thing I wasn't even really, that made him the most insecure.
Sometimes I’ve even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.
I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing.
I had let want in, opened the door ever so slightly. But want without the belief you can get what you want is pointless. You have to hope, so I let that in too. You have to. To want things and go for them and believe, even in impossible situations...Hope was what you had when you had nothing else. Hope was the perfect shiny top on the Christmas tree, the glowing halo of every wish, the endless beacon of a lighthouse bringing tormented ships home at last.
But my apology was a thousand apologies.
Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same. — © Deb Caletti
Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.
Anyway, madness and genius. They're the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow.
You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.
You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.
Let me tell you, you either have chemistry or you don't, and you better have it, or it's like kissing some relative. But chemistry, listen to me, you got to be careful. Chemistry is like those perfume ads, the ones that look so interesting and mysterious but you dont even know at first what they're even selling. Or those menues without the prices. Mystery and intrigue are gonna cost you. Great looking might mean something ve-ry expensive, and I don't mean money. What I'm saying is, chemistry is a place to start, not an end point.
Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves.
I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day get there and get to stay.
Marriage is like a well-built porch. If one of the two posts leans too much, the porch collapses. So each must be strong enough to stand on its own.
We can get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.
If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.
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