Ann Brashares Quotes

When you belonged nowhere, you sort of belonged everywhere. ~ Ann Brashares

Why not celebrate what you had had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There
could be joy in things that ended. ~ Ann Brashares

I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up. ~ Ann Brashares

So often this summer I keep thinking: I know I'm holding back. I know I'm waiting. I know I'm afraid to go forward. But I don't know how to get there from here."
He was quiet, so she kept going. "Sometimes I see it as a tricky mountain pass between two valleys. Other times, it's like perilous straits connecting two lands. Partly it's the fear of the trip itself, I think, but partly it's the fear that I won't be able to get back. I'll turn around and the clouds will have settled over the mountaintop. Or the waters will have risen and shifted, and there will be no way home."
Paul nodded. He took her hand again, which she discovered she appreciated.
But that's not even the real fear."
He gave her an odd smile. Short on mirth but affectionate. "What's the real fear?"
The real fear is that I won't want to go home. ~ Ann Brashares

He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend. ~ Ann Brashares

She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time ~ Ann Brashares

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

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. ~ Ann Brashares

Bridget saw chaos. ~ Ann Brashares

But it was hard to give the real world much notice when he was this close. ~ Ann Brashares

We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real. ~ Ann Brashares

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

How is it that a person could be so relieved and so disappointed, both at the same time. ~ Ann Brashares

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

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

He didn't know if she was awake or asleep, but he felt her heart beating and the further pulse of it in her hands when he held them. He felt the ridge of her shin against his, the softness of her thigh. He didn't know what it meant, but he felt deeply comforted by her skin, her warmth, and the way she always let him in. The things he most loved about holding on to Alice were the same. The feel of a body he trusted. ~ Ann Brashares

People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

You forget your victories, but you remember the losses. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

Greta was squinting at the Pants. "Are those yours?" she asked.
Bridget nodded.
"Would you like me to wash 'em for you? A little bleach would clean that whole mess right off them."
Bridget looked aghast. "No! No, thank you" she cradled them protectively. "I like them how they are."
Greta clucked and shook her head. "To each, her own," she muttered.
You have no magic in you, Bridget thought. ~ Ann Brashares

No matter how it felt to be near him, she had to keep her swollen heart in check. ~ Ann Brashares

There are some people who fall in love over and over. ~ Ann Brashares

Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison. ~ Ann Brashares

You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things ~ Ann Brashares

Marnie hated to see her spend so much of herself on someone who didn't care. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness. ~ Ann Brashares

She had never had a boy talk to her like that. There was no cover of bullshit, no flirtation, no added charm, but his look was searing. He was different from anyone she had known. ~ Ann Brashares

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? ~ Ann Brashares

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

But we were in the same place at the same time in our lives, and for that alone I was inexpressibly buoyant and a few hundred years' worth of grateful. ~ Ann Brashares

I wanted to come more than halfway. ~ Ann Brashares

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

There are moments in your life when the big pieces slide and shift. Sometimes the big changes dong happen gradually but all at once. That's how it was for us. That was the day we discovered that friends can do things for you that your parents can't. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

He took her hand and they started walking toward the baggage claim. They didn't say anything to each other. They swung their held hands like little kids, like they believed anything could happen, like they might take off soaring into the air. All the things you wanted to happen could happen. Why not? ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets. ~ Ann Brashares

I don't have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I've been able to connect with a lot of people. ~ Ann Brashares

I tell myself your spirits were down the day you wrote. You're fine and we're fine. I hope it's true. ~ Ann Brashares

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

Sometimes he felt like the only one on earth. He was different. He always was. His attempts at living in the regular world seemed stupid and false. ~ Ann Brashares

They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she. ~ Ann Brashares

This body is breaking down, but I am not. ~ Ann Brashares

Love is like war; easy to begin, hard to end. ~ Ann Brashares

I'm not going anywhere without you. We're swimming to China together. And if the worst happens, I'm dying with you before I'm living without you. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give. (Lena, 194) ~ Ann Brashares

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

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

She'd never felt about anyone the way she'd felt about him. Not even close. She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. ~ Ann Brashares

They were more like the grown-up dog whose family loved it but had to move to an apartment in Korea (is it Korea?) where people sometimes eat dogs. ~ Ann Brashares

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

Lena always described how she dreaded and mourned things before they even happened. Carmen was beginning to suspect that she was permitting herself to mourn this long separation only now that it was over. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

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

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

Shy" was the sympathetic interpretation she got from older people. "Snotty" was the interpretation she got from people her own age. ~ Ann Brashares

My memory is good for some things and not others. ~ Ann Brashares

What was powerful at thirteen and seventeen should have grown quaint by twenty-four, and yet the covenant, by its nature had durability. It still existed between them. He could feel it even now. You could go away for months and years, but it was still here, bound to what you loved, binding you to it. ~ Ann Brashares

Where there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything. ~ Ann Brashares

When you open yourself to somebody, when you feel these thing that you feel, well, what do you do? You can try to ignore it, maybe you can try to forget about it, but you can't undo it and you can't give it back. ~ Ann Brashares

For some reason our lives were marked by summers ... Summer was the time when our lives joined completely, when we all had our birthdays, when really important things happened ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

I'm afraid of not having enough time," she clarified. "Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies. ~ Ann Brashares

By day she studied and touched her mother's things, and by night, she dreamed about them. The dreams gave her as fragmented a vision of Marley as the boxes in the attic did. There were a thousand dramatic episodes, but very little sense of the person linking them together ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

Love yourself and your friends unconditionally . ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

Pain is fear, and I'm not afraid. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

I agree that a love of reading is a great gift for a parent to pass on to his or her child. ~ Ann Brashares

God often gives nuts to toothless people. - Matt Groening ~ Ann Brashares

He'd given up blessings he hadn't been worthy of for the chance to be with her, and now he'd lost that, too. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

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

I love that blurry place where life's transitions are made without you even knowing it. ~ Ann Brashares

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. ~ Ann Brashares

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

I can't wait for you forever, she found herself thinking as she lay in bed most mornings, thinking about her dreams, waiting for her alarm to ring. ~ Ann Brashares

She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn't sure who'd broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly. ~ Ann Brashares

D it was true she experienced even the strongest pleasures and poignancies down pretty deep. They tended not to make it all the way up to her face. [Lena] ~ Ann Brashares

Someday was the thing he had, because it was a lot harder to ruin than today. ~ Ann Brashares

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

She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not. ~ Ann Brashares

It's always nervewracking to put yourself out there. But it's the root of joy. ~ Ann Brashares

I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny ~ Ann Brashares

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

Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it. ~ Ann Brashares

You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love one another. We're nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen ~ Ann Brashares

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

Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy. ~ Ann Brashares

She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member. ~ Ann Brashares

When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares

During intermission she peeked out at the theater, watching it refill. When it was almost full and the lights blinked on and off, she saw three people file in through the center door and her breath caught. Time lapsed as they walked down the center aisle: three teenage girls all in a row.
They were so big, so bright, so beautiful, so magnificent to Carmen's eyes that she thought she was imagining them. They were like goddesses, like Titans. She was so proud of them! They were benevolent and they were righteous. Now, these were friends. ~ Ann Brashares

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. ~ Ann Brashares