Ann Brashares famous quotes

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

#Looks #Forget

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

#I Hate You #Past #Opportunity

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

#Talking

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

#Friendship #Pain #Joy

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Beautiful #Mistake #Decision

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Happiness #Being Happy #Sisterhood

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

#Birthday #Depression #Time

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Happiness #Lonely #Thinking

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Time #Mistake #Mean

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

#Smile #Knees #Lava

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

#Life #Family #Love You

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Brave #Brain #Would Be

He 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 Brashares

#Loving Someone #Technique #World

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

#Beautiful #Long #Soul

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

#Remember #Forget You #Forget

She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.
-- Ann Brashares

#Strong #Independent #Taste

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Believe #Writing #Character

The path of your life can change in an instant.
-- Ann Brashares

#Path #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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Waiting #Sitting #Benches

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

#Nice #Simple #Secret

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

#Destiny #Littles #Coincidence

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

#Believe #People #First Impression

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

#Inspirational #Attitude #Problem

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Hate #Love You #Let Me

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

#Heart #Tragedy #Admitting

You just have to let people love you in the way they can
-- Ann Brashares

#Love You #People #Way

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Law #Agony #Way

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

#People #Behinds

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

#Self #Survival #Together

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

#Real #Size #Delusion

I want to go where you're going. I'm not scared of dying. I want to stay together and come back together. You said that souls cohere. I want to stay with you.
-- Ann Brashares

#Soul #Together #Dying

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

#Wish #Unhappy #Made

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Years #Self #People

A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.
-- Ann Brashares

#Years #Tangled #Long

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

#Scared

He 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 Brashares

#Memories #Fighting #Skills

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

#Girl #Choices #Saws

Because 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 Brashares

#Uncertain #Messy #Mess

You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful pieve of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want. -pg276
-- Ann Brashares

#Beautiful #Advice #Want

She cared about him too much, and he was a dangerous person to love. He wouldn't love her back.
-- Ann Brashares

#Too Much #Dangerous #Persons

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

#People #Leavers

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

#Loss #Victory #Remember

When your about to criticize someone walk a mile in thier shoes, that way when you criticize them you're a mile away from them and you have their shoes
-- Ann Brashares

#Funny #Hilarious #Shoes

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

#Way #Certain

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Beautiful #Cities #Water

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

#Names #Nurse #Saws

But 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 Brashares

#Girl #Wise #Thinking

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

#Phones #Enemy #Worst

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

#Self #People #Giving

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)
-- Ann Brashares

#Believe #Mean #Thinking

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

#Kids #Air #Hands

Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.
-- Ann Brashares

#How You Feel #Feels

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

#Summer #Needs

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Light #Circles #Understanding

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

#Dream #Chance

Sometimes it is a relief to be invisible
-- Ann Brashares

#Relief #Sometimes #Invisible

She 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 Brashares

#Trying #Alive #Bigs

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

#People #Age #Shy

I like that you let yourself be surprised
-- Ann Brashares

Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.
-- Ann Brashares

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Distance #Taken #Someday

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

#Past #Matter

It was probably good you couldn't flip the love switch because sometimes it was what you needed even if you didn't want it.
-- Ann Brashares

#Want #Flip #Sometimes

He took her in his arms right away. "I'm so sorry," he murmured in her ear. He rocked her, saying it over and over. But no matter how many times he said it, no matter how much she knew he meant it, the words stirred around in her ear but didn't get into her brain. Sometimes he could comfort her. Sometimes he said what she needed, but today he couldn't reach her. Nothing could.
-- Ann Brashares

#Sorry #Brain #Comfort

I'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 Brashares

#Goodbye #Love You #Writing

They needed to grieve alone was what Tibby's dad said. Lena wondered if really there was any choice in that. Everyone grieved alone.
-- Ann Brashares

#Dad #Grieving #Choices

Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.
-- Ann Brashares

#Giving #Aspect

She 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 Brashares

#Smell #Bags #Tonight

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

#Mother #Annoyed #Said

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Mistake #Sacrifice #Asking

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

#Strong #Trying #Have Faith

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Long #Comfort #World

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Real #Long #World

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Memories #Blessing #Giving

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
-- Ann Brashares

#Self #Usual #Routine

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Long #Missing #Soul

You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.
-- Ann Brashares

#Moving #Heart #Blood

A lot of friendship is about practice, that’s something I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. It’s not simply some spiritual soul-bond of memories and longings, it’s really about having coffee every week, or talking on the phone every day or every other day - whatever suits you.
-- Ann Brashares

#Spiritual #Memories #Coffee

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

#Character #Age #Fleeting

I think pants have unique qualities, especially in a woman’s life. Whatever bodily insecurities we have, we seem to take out on our pants.
-- Ann Brashares

#Unique #Thinking #Insecurity

Love yourself and your friends unconditionally .
-- Ann Brashares

#Love You #Love Yourself

Besides 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 Brashares

#Writing #Character #Age

You carry your past with you even if you don't remember any of it.
-- Ann Brashares

#Past #Remember #Your Past

When there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.
-- Ann Brashares

#Possibility

I dont really write with the idea of trying to teach any lessons. I want to tell a story as truthfully and engagingly as I can, and then let the chips fall where they may.
-- Ann Brashares

#Fall #Writing #Ideas

Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.
-- Ann Brashares

#Grief #Three #Rooms

There are going to be moments of deep, deep doubts, and you have to have faith that your initial idea was good and just muddle through.
-- Ann Brashares

#Writing #Ideas #Doubt

Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it's really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something.
-- Ann Brashares

#Jobs #Mean #Writing

Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.
-- Ann Brashares

#Peace #Sex #Weapons

Maybe 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 Brashares

#Moving #Each Day #Littles

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

#Knowing #Transition #Blurry

I love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way.
-- Ann Brashares

#Ideas #World #Way

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

#Summer #Important #Reason

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 Brashares

#Baby #Character #Losing Yourself

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.
-- Ann Brashares

#Father #Book #Two

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

#Writing #Thinking #World

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

#Book #Adults #Sophisticated

My household is, in a nice way, very busy.
-- Ann Brashares

#Nice #Way #Busy

It's so much easier to have no expectations than to have big ones.
-- Ann Brashares

#Expectations #Easier #Bigs

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

#Children #Reading #Parent