Ann Brashares Quotes

We will go. Nowhere we know. We don't have to talk at all.

A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.

She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

She was supposed to be putting her life together right now, and all she could seem to do was throw grenades at it.

She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.

You Could Only See As Far As Your Headlights, But You Can Make Your Whole Trip That Way

And I thought about the color and I realized what blue it was. It was the soft and changeable, essential blue of a well-worn pair of pants.
Pants = Love

Rule #1: The customer is always right. Rule #2: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule #1.
-Duncan Howe

She had to do something. She felt so desperate she couldn't even stand to be in her own skin. She would rather have clubbed herself over the head with her history binder than feel the things she was feeling.
This was why she had broken up with him. So she wouldn't have to go through this. The wishing and wanting and not having. Why had it turned out so wrong?

Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.

A lot of friendship is about practice, that's something I've learned as I've gotten older. It's not simply some spiritual soul-bond of memories and longings, it's really about having coffee every week, or talking on the phone every day or every other day - whatever suits you.

I mean putting yourself out there in the way of overwhelming happiness and knowing you're also putting yourself in the way of terrible harm. I'm scared to be this happy. I'm scared to be this extreme.

Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still.

Marnie loved her better and more honestly than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of her mother, who loved her intensely if not honestly.

If you ever meet a guy and you fall in love with him, but because of some weird genetic mutation he doesn't seem to return the feeling? ... Wear that dress.

She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.

The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn't see it.

You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want.

It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.

She discarded whole chunks of life that obsessed other people. She didn't torture people she loved, nor did she hunger for them. She kept it simple.

You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn't decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.

She got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted.

Sometimes you couldn't face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.

God often gives nuts to toothless people. - Matt Groening

Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly.

If you didn't have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let this world happen to you ... he didn't see eternity. He saw this girl and this moment and this one slim chance.

You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.

Together or apart, no matter ow far apart, we live in one anther. We go n together.

Life isn't just fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. -William Goldman

Yeah. You know what I think?"
What?"
So intense was Tibby, she had practically shoved the phone into her ear cavity.
She has big boobies.

Alice kept thinking about that passage from one part of life to another. She kept thinking, Is this it? Will I know if it is? Will I be ready?Will I make it across? Will I chicken out? Will I know when I'm saying goodbye? When I look back, will I still be able to see what I've left behind? She thought she would know when it happened.But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were.

There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him.

Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes.

Carmen: I want you to leave me alone, but not ignore me. I want you to miss me when I go away to college, but not be sad. I want you to stay exactly the same, but not be lonely or alone. I want to do the leaving, and not have you ever leave me.

At the worst possible moment, the most painful, darkest moment when you can't take it anymore and you are afraid, that is when a feeling of peace and comfort will come over you, and it's like nothing you've ever felt.

What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.

Single-minded to the point of recklessness

The phone was her worst enemy and her best friend but she never knew which until she answered it.

We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.

You don't mean it," he said mournfully. Not at all, she thought. "Yes, I do," she said.

If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death.

I did love her. I've loved her from the first time I saw her.

Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.
If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.

What's the occasion?" she asked.
He kissed her ear. "I've got a gorgeous woman who's going to be my bride."
She laughed. "You have that every night."
"That's why I want to celebrate.

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What can I say? I'm obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can't be held responsible for our actions.

Grandma kept turning around in the front seat of their old Fiat saying, "Look at you girls! On, Lena, you are a beauty!"
Lena seriously wished she would stop saying that, because it was irritating, and besides, how was cranky Effie supposed to feel?

She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn't. You didn't know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn't know how strong you were.

The angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. - George Eliot

Finally, she was doing something. She didn't know what, exactly, but action always suited her better than waiting around.

Nobody bothered with him. His failures were private and invisible

Your problem isn't the problem, it's your attitude about the problem.

She wasn't comfortable with the term boyfriend even when she did have one, and she hated everybody knowing her private business.

Why couldn't it belong to him anymore? Why couldn't he belong to it? Because he gave it up. He held on to himself, and he threw the other things away.

She was becoming the person she'd be for her whole life. Each thing she chose contributed to that person. She didn't want to be like this.

How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?"
Eudoxia's expression grew more serious. "That's what you're doing anyway, my dear.

In this present body he hadn't been loved, and he found almost nothing to love about himself.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

She had to have faith not just in trying but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail Was she strong enough not to

Can you make yourself love? Can you make yourself loved?
-Lena Kaligaris

She glared at him, feeling the old frustration. Sometimes in his presence she felt the deepest connection to him, and other times she felt completely alone-as though any bond to him was her own bitter imagination.

The world was full of death, full of sadness, full of people, full of people too broken to lean on.

It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

Daniel?"
"Yes."
"Did you ever think we were meant not to be together?"
"No. We are meant to be together. We are just meant to want it very badly.

"Yes."
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"Yes."
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She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn't going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn't going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.

Healing wasn't always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that.

You should find him because he loves you.

She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?

I love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way.

Some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.

I felt as though the
past and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going.
If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That's all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we need
those stories. I guess I do.

I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.

But like everything else, love changed.

Don't talk to me. I'm tired and grumpy and I'll probably make fun of you.

No matter how far back you cut a willow tree, it will never really die.

This body is breaking down, but I am not.

Treasure in such large amounts stopped feeling precious

Maybe, sometimes, it's easier to be mad at the people you trust because you know they'll always love you, no matter what.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

It's natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily most gracefully. So here's me asking you to please not make that mistake.

She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn't be. Oh, well.

Every life I start with her, my original sin. I know myself through her.

He'd pushed her. He'd scared her. He'd besieged her. He'd vowed he wouldn't, and he did.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what precious gifts they would ever get.

She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.

He is the drip, drip of water that carves a canyon right through the middle of me.

As much as I'm drawn to writing about teenage girls, I like the idea of having the freedom to branch out and write about different ages, for different ages.

But there were times when you felt miserable and you wanted to feel better, and other times when you felt miserable and you figured you would just keep on feeling miserable.

He didn't want to go forward, but he always wanted to get another chance.

Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.

Could she kiss him? Would he allow her that? Was that something he could pretend was nothing? What about making love? Could she just open up her legs and pull him inside her and have him all she wanted and later give her assent that it was nothing?

The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.

Dad,
Please accept this money to fix the broken window. I'm sure it's already fixed, considering Lydia's house pride and her phobia about unconditioned air, but

Dear Al,
I can't begin to explain my actions at Lydia's – I mean yours and Lydia's house. When I get to Charleston, I never imagined that you would have

Dear Dad and Lydia,
I apologize to both of you for my irrational behavior. I know it's all my fault, but if you would have listened to ONE THING I had to say, I might not have

Dear Dad's new family,
I hope you'll all be very happy being blond together. May people speak only in inside voices for the rest of your lives.
P.S. Lydia, you wedding dress makes your arms look fat.

Maybe they would look at each other and feel some odd yearning, but neither of them would know why. They would want to stop, but they would be embarrassed, and neither would know what to say. They would go their separate ways. Who knew? Maybe that happened every day to people who'd once loved each other.

The rules took a while to sort out. Lena and Carmen wanted to focus on friendship-type rules, stuff about keeping in touch with one another over the summer, and making sure the Pants kept moving from one girl to the next. Tibby preferred to focus on random things you could and couldn't do in the Pants
like picking your nose.

I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.

A pigeon is the same thing as a dove, did you know that? Bridget

For the first time she saw that the nurse's name was Tabitha.

Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.