Ann Brashares Quotations

Why does he have to be my boyfriend? Are you inferior if you don't have a boyfriend? Why does everybody have to be in love with somebody?

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

She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn’t have it. Why did she always feel she had to do something in the face of beauty?

She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own.

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.

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

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

Carmen hated the 'life is too short" rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because "life is too short not to," you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.

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.

The weather turned. Her skin seemed to grow a million extra pores, and all of them opened to take in the warmth and tenderness of the air. The sun on her face made her want to cry. Into all those millions of open pores came the sunshine, and other feelings as well. In and out. She was porous.

The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched.

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.

He loved her for being so beautiful, and he hated her for it. He loved how she put shiny stuff on her lips for him, and he also reviled her for it. He wanted her to walk home alone, and he wanted to run after her and grab her up before she could take another step.

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.

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

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

Sometimes it is a relief to be invisible

Shy” was the sympathetic interpretation she got from older people. “Snotty” was the interpretation she got from people her own age.

I like that you let yourself be surprised

So far, she’d been her usual lame self: solitary and routine-loving, carefully avoiding any path that might lead to spontaneous human interaction. Lena Kaligaris

I’m sorry you asked me out, otherwise maybe I could have liked you.

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

Don't ask me any questions right now. I'm grumpy and I'll probablly make fun of you. -Effie Kaligaris

Show me a girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and I'll show you a girl who can't put her pants on. -Annik Marchand

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

Everything I ever said to you was true and is true.

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.

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.

Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.

The dreams weren’t as pleasing when they had no chance of coming true

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.

But then she hadn’t just learned to love this summer – she had also learned how to need.

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

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

You get older and you learn there is one sentence just four worlds long and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this… Ready ” “Ready.” “At least I tried.

She couldn’t hide from everyone for the rest of her life… Well she could. That was the direction things were going. But she knew from long-ago experience that when you were uncertain and if you were courageous enough to let her in a real friend could do a world of good.

It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.

The present no matter what I brought couldn’t change the past. The Past was set and sealed.

He no longer represented someday a possibility. He represented a road not taken a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn’t see it anymore.

Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.

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

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)

People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same." (Lena, 211)

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?

She wasn't as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she'd slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts.

The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.

The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it.

Please believe him. Keep your heart open to him. He can make you happy. He has always loved you, and you once loved him with all your heart.

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.

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.

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

It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didn’t come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you weren’t ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal.

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.

She wasn’t sure if he wanted more from her or if he wanted less. Maybe it was both. Maybe it was always both.

There was a moment in between, a moment flung free in the midst of the transition, when he made contact. That was the moment she would dwell on.

Alice suspected Paul couldn’t really picture his father, just like she couldn’t picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.

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

It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans.

There was one thing Bridget like about guys. They took insults well.

Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth.

you remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you.

What if people knew they were recycled? Would that change anything?

It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.

Some things have to be believed to be seen. -Ralph Hodgson

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

Luck never gives; it lends.

As the three of them walked home from the trees, nobody needed to say it, but Ama knew. They had questioned their friendship. They had searched and wondered, looking for a sign. And all along they'd had their trees. You couldn't wear them. You couldn't pass them around. They offered no fashion advantage. But they had roots. They lived.

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.

Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you'll never run out.

Carmen sat up when she heard a familiar trill from her computer. It was an instant message from Bee. Beezy3: Packing. Do you have my purple sock with the heart on the ankle? Carmabelle: No. Like I'd wear your socks. Carmen looked from her computer screen down to her feet. To her dismay, her socks were two faintly different shades of purple. She rotated her foot to get a view of her anklebone. Carmabelle: Ahem. Might possibly have sock.

She closed her eyes. "I didn't know that. i didn't know anything. It scares me the things I told myself. But I would have told myself almost anything, because I wanted to believe him." "Why?" "Because I wanted to be with you.

You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It`s you who makes me a person.

Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you`ll keep faith in me, you`ll remember who we are, and you`ll never feel despair.

All my life, everybody has seen me a certain way. What do you see?

I knew her hair and her coloring and her shapes would be different next time, but the way she wore her body would keep on.

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

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

When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word.

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

I look back on my 20s. It's supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you're making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.

Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things.

Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.

Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.

I'm afraid of time... I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies.

Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.

There was love expressed in the places you usually forget to look.

The path of your life can change in an instant.

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.

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

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.

I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny

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

When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

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

I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.

A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting.

She was astonished, and at the same time she knew. There were many things in life like that. You couldn’t imagine it, and then it happened and you couldn’t really imagine it hadn’t.