Ann Brashares Quotations | Page 3

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.

Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn’t matter if you friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.

What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?

All I could think to do was love her. That's all a person can do.

You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.

He just wanted to look at her and know her life was marching along under the same arch of time and space as he is.

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

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

You should find him because he loves you.

But I know this. We're ready to move forward again in our way. Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.

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.

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.

She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.

Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.

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

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

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

Pain is fear, and I'm not afraid.

This body is breaking down, but I am not.

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.

But it was smell that carried memory.

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.

The most haunting thing was not that he didn't love her anymore. She could have accepted that eventually. The most haunting thing was that he did. He loved her from afar. He loved her in a way that was preserved in time, that couldn't be sullied. And she tended it in her careful, curatorial way.

Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile

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.

She wanted him to notice her so much.

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.

I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.

He could lose himself in her forever, he thought.

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

She'd loved him as much as he'd let her. More than he'd let her.

She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew.

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

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

She hadn't chosen the brave life. She'd chosen the small, fearful one.

How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.

His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.

Riley was quiet for a minute. She gathered her blanket all around her. "Paul always loved you, Alice. He knows I know that. I know he loves me, too. But it's different." Alice opened her mouth, but nothing came out at first. "He loved me once. But I think that part is over," she said slowly. "No, it's not. It hasn't even begun." Riley took Alice's bare foot in her hand and squeezed it. "I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first."

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

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.

Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.

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.

Polly was pretty good at dieting, all right, but she was beginning to wonder whether you ever lost the parts of your self that you wanted to lose.

Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter)

she never showed girly weaknesses like cellulite or crushes. she never lingered on injustices committed against her.

She wanted him to see all of her and also none of her. She wanted him to be dazzled by the bits and blinded by the whole. She wanted him to see her whole and not in pieces. She had hopes that were hard to satisfy.

I love you, I'll never stop.

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

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.

Honesty was a tough customer... Once you started allowing yourself some honesty, it couldn't easily be contained or limited to one part of your life. It was like poison ivy or a bossy houseguest. Once it was there, you couldn't tell it what to do. You had to really fight to keep it from taking over.

She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.

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

I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight--at least as they normally experienced them....Some people lost their individuality in the water, but Riley always felt most herself. Water was supposed to symbolize renewal, she knew, but when Riley swam, pared down, alone, and unreachable--she felt a deeper sense of who she already was.

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

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

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.

Sometimes you need to make a mess. -Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeper

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

Wish for what you want, work for what you need. -Carmen's grandmother

You'll turn out ordinary if you're not careful.

There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone. The very act of caring made them impossible to regain.

One must have a good memory to keep the promises one has made.

There are some people who fall in love over and over.

Love didn't necessarily look the way you expected it to.

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.

Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.

Tibby was shaking her head. "What?" Bailey asked. "Nothing. Just that you suprise me every day," Tibby said. Bailey smiled at her. "I like that you let yourself be suprised.

Wear them, they will make you brave.

Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. "I'm scared... ," she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.

There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

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

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.

Looking back, it was the thing in his life that shamed him the most: the times he was purposefully, calculatingly mean to Alice. It was those moments, and there had been many of them, that indicated to him that he was not a good person. He got mad at her for many things, but it was always really for the same thing: that she possessed his love and he couldn't seem to get it back. She didn't deserve it, which was to say she deserved better

Ruins stood for what was lost, and yet there were beautiful-peaceful, historic, intellectual. Not tragic or regrettable. Lena tried to keep hers that way too, and she succeeded to some extent. Why not celebrate what you had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There could be joy in things that ended.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.