Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.
Ann BrasharesI love her. I need her. I gave away everything I had for her. I just wanted her to know me.
Ann BrasharesShe wasn’t sure if he wanted more from her or if he wanted less. Maybe it was both. Maybe it was always both.
Ann BrasharesShe was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big. As big as she could. She promised Bailey she would keep playing.
Ann BrasharesYou 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.
Ann BrasharesDuring 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 BrasharesTibby 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.
Ann BrasharesBesides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. 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 BrasharesHer 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.
Ann BrasharesMaybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.
Ann BrasharesIt 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 BrasharesShe got under the covers and put her arms around the bag. She could smell Tibby. It used to be she couldn't smell Tibby's smell in the way you couldn't smell your own; it was too familiar. But tonight she could. This was some living part of Tibby still here and she held on to it. There was more of Tibby with her here and now than in what she had seen in the cold basement room that day.
Ann BrasharesShe loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.
Ann BrasharesI'm writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don't think I can say it. I'm not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I'm doing it to thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you.
Ann BrasharesWe 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.
Ann BrasharesHonesty 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.
Ann BrasharesHe had to fight. That's all he had. Not memories, not experiences, not skills. He had a will. And his will was to fight until he couldn't fight anymore.
Ann BrasharesI allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.
Ann BrasharesI 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 BrasharesBut will he come I just want to know what you think the odds are. Tell me what you really think." "I think Tibby was a wise girl. I think she loved you.
Ann BrasharesPeople 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.
Ann BrasharesSo 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
Ann BrasharesAs a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
Ann BrasharesHe just wanted to look at her and know her life was marching along under the same arch of time and space as he is.
Ann BrasharesHe tricked himself into thinking that she would look into his eyes and remember, that love would conquer all.
Ann BrasharesBecause she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself. ... As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product.
Ann BrasharesHe wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.
Ann BrasharesThere 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.
Ann BrasharesTibby 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.
Ann BrasharesBut then she hadn’t just learned to love this summer – she had also learned how to need.
Ann BrasharesPolly 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.
Ann BrasharesTheir friendship was only one aspect of their lives but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.
Ann Brashares