Ann Brashares Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Sometimes it is a relief to be invisible

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

Tibby's wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 the normally experienced them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.

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.

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

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

Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.

The path of your life can change in an instant.

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

I like that you let yourself be surprised

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

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

It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

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.

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

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.

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

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 should find him because he loves you.

When I turned fifteen, I remember my father gave me a credit card which I was allowed to use for two things: emergencies and books.

What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.

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

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.

Bridget's anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and contolled it, whereas the sadness owned her.

When there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.

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.