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Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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
Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives but it seemed to give meaning to all the others. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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? -- Ann Brashares
I killed her once and died for her many times and I still have nothing to show for it. I always search for her ; I always remember her. I carry the hope that someday she will remember me. -- Ann Brashares
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
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. -- Ann Brashares
You have to be like a turtle, she thought; you have to figure out how to bring your home along with you. -- Ann Brashares
But we were in the same place at the same time in our lives, and for that alone I was inexpressibly buoyant and a few hundred years' worth of grateful. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
I know you are always finding ways to love me in spite of how horrible I am, I hope I haven't run out of chances. -- Ann Brashares
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. (Riley to her sister Alice about Paul) -- Ann Brashares
Thoughts were nothing. Memories were nothing. They were nothing you could touch. They took no time. You could fit them all on the point of a pin. You could bring your entire world into doubt in a span of a few seconds. -- Ann Brashares
But certain souls cohere. It's rare but possible. But it takes two powerful wills to make it so. -- Ann Brashares
My butt has specific requirements for pants. -- Ann Brashares
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
I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting. -- Ann Brashares
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
No one really believes in the future, do they? It's like believing in your own death. You can't do it. -- Ann Brashares
Carmen: I want you to leave me alone, but not ignore me. I want you to miss me when I go away to college, but not be sad. I want you to stay exactly the same, but not be lonely or alone. I want to do the leaving, and not have you ever leave me. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
You broke up with him," a combination Effie-Carmen voice in her head reminded her.
"But that didn't mean you were allowed to stop loving me," she felt like saying to him. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
He could lose himself in her forever, he thought. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
No matter how it felt to be near him, she had to keep her swollen heart in check. -- Ann Brashares
sometimes you need to make a mess. -- Ann Brashares
She'd put the envelope Tibby had left for her unopened in her underwear drawer. At first it was so she would see it there, and then she tried to cover it so she wouldn't see it there, but it turned out her underwear was too flimsy to cover anything. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
One must have a good memory to keep the promises one has made. -- Ann Brashares
When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word. -- Ann Brashares
Carma,
Here are the Pants and a little sketch I made of Leo. From memory, not from life. (And no, I'm not thinging of him day and night. God.)
Funny hair, huh?
He did not realize I was in his class. I think I'm making a big impression around here.
Love you,
Len -- Ann Brashares
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
We will go. Nowhere we know. We don't have to talk at all. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
It was so hard to live the right kind of life, even if you knew what it was. -- Ann Brashares
Tibby, on the other hand, had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with Brian striving for the comfort of not knowing. -- Ann Brashares
Sometimes when she thought of Eric, and now more powerfully when she saw him, she felt some achy nostalgia for her old self. For the dauntless, daring soul she used to be. There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone. -- Ann Brashares
By day she studied and touched her mother's things, and by night, she dreamed about them. The dreams gave her as fragmented a vision of Marley as the boxes in the attic did. There were a thousand dramatic episodes, but very little sense of the person linking them together -- Ann Brashares
My memory is good for some things and not others. -- Ann Brashares
You'll turn out ordinary if you're not careful. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
I love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
All I could think to do was love her. That's all a person can do. -- Ann Brashares
When you open yourself to somebody, when you feel these thing that you feel, well, what do you do? You can try to ignore it, maybe you can try to forget about it, but you can't undo it and you can't give it back. -- Ann Brashares
A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting. -- Ann Brashares
Your problem isn't the problem, it's your attitude about the problem. -- Ann Brashares
Yeah. You know what I think?"
What?"
So intense was Tibby, she had practically shoved the phone into her ear cavity.
She has big boobies. -- Ann Brashares
Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings. -- Ann Brashares
Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile -- Ann Brashares
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
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
He didn't want to go forward, but he always wanted to get another chance. -- Ann Brashares
We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real. -- Ann Brashares
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
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. -- Ann Brashares
You carry your past with you even if you don't remember any of it. -- Ann Brashares
God often gives nuts to toothless people. - Matt Groening -- Ann Brashares
Finally, she was doing something. She didn't know what, exactly, but action always suited her better than waiting around. -- Ann Brashares
She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn't going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn't going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at. -- Ann Brashares
Wear them, they will make you brave. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
They were more like the grown-up dog whose family loved it but had to move to an apartment in Korea (is it Korea?) where people sometimes eat dogs. -- Ann Brashares
Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison. -- Ann Brashares
To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world. -- Ann Brashares
Every life I start with her, my original sin. I know myself through her. -- Ann Brashares
Marnie hated to see her spend so much of herself on someone who didn't care. -- Ann Brashares
It seems to me like a failure of language that experience fits into a regular sentence made up of ordinary words. It fits into one word. "Experience. -- Ann Brashares
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
Remember: Pants=Love. Love your pals. Love yourself. -- Ann Brashares
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
Shy" was the sympathetic interpretation she got from older people. "Snotty" was the interpretation she got from people her own age. -- Ann Brashares
A lot of irrational behavior would look more rational if you could see it in the context of your whole long life. -- Ann Brashares
He is the drip, drip of water that carves a canyon right through the middle of me. -- Ann Brashares
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
Patrick: I'm mad. SpongeBob: What's the matter, Patrick? Patrick: I can't see my forehead. -- Ann Brashares
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
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. -- Ann Brashares
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
Do you have any idea how much I've loved you? -- Ann Brashares
As much as I'm drawn to writing about teenage girls, I like the idea of having the freedom to branch out and write about different ages, for different ages. -- Ann Brashares
In a flash of wonderment she saw firm, continuous ground under her feet, stretching from back then to right now and on and on as far as her eyes could take her. -- Ann Brashares
But now he held her. He forgot to worry as much about waking her up. She turned her body to his, eyes closed, and curled herself around him. She pressed her cheek to her chest, and he felt the tickle of her hair in his neck and under his nose. Trust and love went together. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn't forget? -- Ann Brashares
It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions. -- Ann Brashares
Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Forget Jack, I'm in love with the cold, dirt floor. -- Ann Brashares
I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past. -- Ann Brashares
But like everything else, love changed. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Maybe, sometimes, it's easier to be mad at the people you trust because you know they'll always love you, no matter what. -- Ann Brashares
He could take happiness from her, but could he give any? -- Ann Brashares
Could she kiss him? Would he allow her that? Was that something he could pretend was nothing? What about making love? Could she just open up her legs and pull him inside her and have him all she wanted and later give her assent that it was nothing? -- Ann Brashares
As it was a small town and a bored town and a hopeful town, kids talked and rumors started. -- Ann Brashares
Part of the danger of living so long, knowing you were going to come back and back again, was putting off your life until you never lived it at all. Just so it was possible. Just so long as you could, you never actually did. Just so you didn't ruin it. -- Ann Brashares
What if people knew they were recycled? Would that change anything? -- Ann Brashares
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
There was a mysterious chasm between this island and the greater world, just like there was between old and young, ancient and new. -- Ann Brashares
D it was true she experienced even the strongest pleasures and poignancies down pretty deep. They tended not to make it all the way up to her face. [Lena] -- Ann Brashares
Single-minded to the point of recklessness -- Ann Brashares
Don't ask me any questions right now. I'm grumpy and I'll probablly make fun of you.
-Effie Kaligaris -- Ann Brashares
But it was smell that carried memory. -- Ann Brashares
Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good about yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could flip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct ad had nothing at all to give. -- Ann Brashares
You are not going to die, I know I said I'd let you, but I can't. -- Ann Brashares
She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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
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
Why did he keep going when everyone else got to start over? -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Time was moving backward, it seemed, and the future was mostly forgotten. -- Ann Brashares
I love that blurry place where life's transitions are made without you even knowing it. -- Ann Brashares
His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children. -- Ann Brashares
A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Life isn't just fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. -William Goldman -- Ann Brashares
She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Grandma kept turning around in the front seat of their old Fiat saying, "Look at you girls! On, Lena, you are a beauty!"
Lena seriously wished she would stop saying that, because it was irritating, and besides, how was cranky Effie supposed to feel? -- Ann Brashares
I don't want to be the only good thing in the world. -- Ann Brashares
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
She wasn't sure if he wanted more from her or if he wanted less. Maybe it was both. Maybe it was always both. -- Ann Brashares
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
I guess I was better at loving then, too, and also better at being loved - the two go together. -- Ann Brashares
Live, laugh, love.
When you can feel someone else's pain and joy as if it's your own, thats when you know you really love them - Tina Lowell -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
He occupied an alternate universe that intersected nowhere with hers. 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 where it went anymore. -- 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
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. -- Ann Brashares
There was love expressed in the places you usually forget to look. -- Ann Brashares
I felt like a pianist who'd been forced to play on a few white keys in the middle, finally allowed to run his hands all up and down the keyboard. -- Ann Brashares
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
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
It's more that I'm afraid of time. And not having enough of it. Time to figure out who I'm supposed to be ... to find my place in the world before I have to leave it. I'm afraid of what I'll miss. -- Ann Brashares
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you. -- Ann Brashares
What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them. -- Ann Brashares
I told him 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. -- Ann Brashares
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? -- Ann Brashares
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 -- Ann Brashares
Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down there on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him. -- Ann Brashares
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
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. -- Ann Brashares
She was back on the ground, looking down at the bugs rather than up at the sky. -- Ann Brashares
I can't wait for you forever, she found herself thinking as she lay in bed most mornings, thinking about her dreams, waiting for her alarm to ring. -- Ann Brashares
She wished she could swap her days for her nights, her reality for her dreams. -- Ann Brashares
She was bad at love. She loved too hard. -- Ann Brashares
Or was he the romantic fiction of a girl who'd been desperate for a handsome stranger to come along? -- Ann Brashares
There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn't quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren't under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you'd have to land eventually. -- Ann Brashares
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
It's wrong, I know, but I play out this dance with him, exquisite and slow. I play it out in my head, because that is the only place it will ever happen. -- Ann Brashares
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
It was endlessly tricky being in the know. It was a state Carmen had a achieved with a certain bravado, but she found it difficult to maintain. Without Jones, she could easily slip out of the know, relapse into her natural eagerness, and probably never get hired for another part in her life. -- Ann Brashares
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
I'm afraid of not having enough time," she clarified. "Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies. -- Ann Brashares
Together or apart, no matter ow far apart, we live in one anther. We go n together. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Can you make yourself love? Can you make yourself loved?
-Lena Kaligaris -- Ann Brashares
The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated. -- Ann Brashares
She wanted him to notice her so much. -- Ann Brashares
The gap between what we say and what we feel is so big and dark that sometimes I think I'll fall into it and just keep falling -- Ann Brashares
He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend. -- Ann Brashares
A pigeon is the same thing as a dove, did you know that? Bridget -- Ann Brashares
You couldn't count on Providence for anything ever. -- Ann Brashares
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
Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but it never made any progress. Later she remembered thinking that a normal person might have begun by saying that he was like the beach. -- Ann Brashares
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
In this present body he hadn't been loved, and he found almost nothing to love about himself. -- Ann Brashares
She'd loved him as much as he'd let her. More than he'd let her. -- Ann Brashares
When life gives you lemons, say, "yeah I like lemons, what else ya got"? -- Ann Brashares
I've always feared she would find completion without me, and I'd be around, stupid and unperfected, forever. -- Ann Brashares
Girls who wouldn't take risks both loved and hated girls who did. Bridget -- Ann Brashares
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
Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought. -- Ann Brashares
She discarded whole chunks of life that obsessed other people. She didn't torture people she loved, nor did she hunger for them. She kept it simple. -- Ann Brashares
Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. -- Ann Brashares
He had found the courage once in his life to seize a chance at love from a person who knew how to give it. Lena prayed on these two moons that she would find that same courage. -- Ann Brashares
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
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. -- Ann Brashares
She sat on the dock at the lake and watched the clouds thicken. She wished it would rain hard and long and clear everything away. Rain never came when you asked for it. -- Ann Brashares
What Daniel taketh away, Daniel giveth. -- Ann Brashares
Well, this is it ... I choose you ... Come what may, you are what I choose. -- Ann Brashares
I agree that a love of reading is a great gift for a parent to pass on to his or her child. -- Ann Brashares
He tricked himself into thinking that she would look into his eyes and remember, that love would conquer all. -- Ann Brashares
Because the truth wouldn't be comforting and wouldn't bring them closer again. -- Ann Brashares
Each of these moments was a pearl on a string, one prettier and more perfect than the next. -- Ann Brashares
It's by living that you live more. -- Ann Brashares
It was wrong. But it was worth it. -- Ann Brashares
You forget your victories, but you remember the losses. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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
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
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
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
Anatole and I had barely kissed. Most couples in the history of the world had barely kissed. It's when the world changed and people started doing everything else, that's when everybody got divorced. -- Ann Brashares
All my life, everybody has seen me a certain way. What do you see? -- Ann Brashares
Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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
Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes. -- Ann Brashares
Tibby, you are crazy," Carmen said. "Those pants are in love with you. They want you for your body and your mind." She couldn't help seeing the pants in a completely new way. -- Ann Brashares
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
How many times could you give up on someone you loved? -- Ann Brashares
What can I say? I'm obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can't be held responsible for our actions. -- Ann Brashares
She didn't open the envelope until she'd gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadn't given her the thousand dollars she'd asked for-he'd given her ten thousand. -- Ann Brashares
You remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you. -- Ann Brashares
I love you, I'll never stop. -- Ann Brashares
Sometimes you need to make a mess. -Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeper -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks. The traffic signal that said walk the second you got there, that happened to every person in the course of a day. -- Ann Brashares
The dreams weren't as pleasing when they had no chance of coming true -- Ann Brashares
Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Why do we fight the things we fight when giving into them isn't so bad at all? -- Ann Brashares
At least I tried. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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 think the true ascent of man, the moment when humans divided irrevobably from apes and other fellow creatures, occurred with the birth of the first distinct soul. And much happiness ensued. -- Ann Brashares
Rule #1: The customer is always right. Rule #2: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule #1.
-Duncan Howe -- Ann Brashares
Because they forgot and I remembered. They would be lost soon enough, and I would keep going. The best I could do was hold on to them after they forgot themselves. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Women always seemed to bring the size they wished they were to the fitting room, rather than the size that would actually fit. -- Ann Brashares
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
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. -- Ann Brashares
The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford. -- Ann Brashares
I confess I've relived it so many times, I hardly remember it anymore. My feelings are strong enough to refract and distort the truth of that journey. But then ... my feelings are the truth of that journey -- Ann Brashares
Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what precious gifts they would ever get. -- Ann Brashares
Pain is fear, and I'm not afraid. -- Ann Brashares
It's always nervewracking to put yourself out there. But it's the root of joy. -- Ann Brashares
Something about giving in without a fight felt wrong. -- Ann Brashares
She wasn't as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she'd slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts. -- Ann Brashares
His power over her was limited, because she didn't love him. -- Ann Brashares
The angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. - George Eliot -- Ann Brashares
She was supposed to be putting her life together right now, and all she could seem to do was throw grenades at it. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Everything good requires sacrifices. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Where there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
There are some people who fall in love over and over. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn't sure who'd broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly. -- Ann Brashares
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
She'd never felt about anyone the way she'd felt about him. Not even close. She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. -- Ann Brashares
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
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. -- Ann Brashares
How is it that a person could be so relieved and so disappointed, both at the same time. -- Ann Brashares
Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms. -- Ann Brashares
You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things -- Ann Brashares
You just have to let people love you in the way they can -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Bridget's anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her. -- Ann Brashares
I did love her. I've loved her from the first time I saw her. -- Ann Brashares
The summers before that are a blur of baby oil and Sun-In and hating our bodies (I got big breasts; Tibby got no breasts) at the Rockwood public swimming pool. -- Ann Brashares
It was a strange thing about college. You felt like you were supposed to be finding your life there. Each person you saw, you thought, Will you mean something to me? Will we figure into each other's lives? -- Ann Brashares
Like why Lena always thought of Ritz crackers when she shaved her legs. Who knew why? And did it even matter? -- Ann Brashares
People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress? -- Ann Brashares
Skinny girls have skinny minds -- Ann Brashares
I'm sorry you asked me out, otherwise maybe I could have liked you. -- Ann Brashares
Bridget loved the Marly who glittered and preened, but this was the woman she remembered.
That was how the story went. That was how it really ended. -- Ann Brashares
He didn't seem to realize that three excuses was as good as no excuse. -- Ann Brashares
She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. There were plenty of things she would like to look back on but wasn't willing to risk ... -- Ann Brashares
He'd pushed her. He'd scared her. He'd besieged her. He'd vowed he wouldn't, and he did. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
She never showed girly weaknesses like cellulite or crushes. she never lingered on injustices committed against her. -- Ann Brashares
Someday was the thing he had, because it was a lot harder to ruin than today. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
[Carmen] knew a worse friend would have made her feel better. -- Ann Brashares
Hey," he said. "It's someday." He said the last word in Greek. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans. -- Ann Brashares
She wasn't comfortable with the term boyfriend even when she did have one, and she hated everybody knowing her private business. -- Ann Brashares
What is it we recognize? The soul is a mysterious thing. It's no less mysterious for me, though I've seen my own and others' refracted through hundreds of bodies over time. -- Ann Brashares
I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them. -- Ann Brashares
It's so much easier to have no expectations than to have big ones. -- Ann Brashares
I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can't make yourself love someone, can you? -- Ann Brashares
She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed. -- Ann Brashares
You Could Only See As Far As Your Headlights, But You Can Make Your Whole Trip That Way -- Ann Brashares
She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn't be. Oh, well. -- Ann Brashares
Are you sure were not dead?"
"I really fucking hope not. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
She looked up at the stars and gave Tibby thanks. She didn't have to throw her thoughts far to know they reached her. -- Ann Brashares
Bouncing is for balls.
-Tibby Rollins -- Ann Brashares
But it was hard to give the real world much notice when he was this close. -- Ann Brashares
The phone was her worst enemy and her best friend but she never knew which until she answered it. -- Ann Brashares
Treasure in such large amounts stopped feeling precious -- Ann Brashares
It was amazing, really, the effort that went into the absence of things. -- Ann Brashares
He was a caricature of a caricature of a loser. -- Ann Brashares
We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets. -- Ann Brashares
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
Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it. -- Ann Brashares
She was becoming the person she'd be for her whole life. Each thing she chose contributed to that person. She didn't want to be like this. -- Ann Brashares
She hadn't chosen the brave life. She'd chosen the small, fearful one. -- Ann Brashares
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
I like that you let yourself be surprised -- Ann Brashares
Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. Then you didn't want it anymore. You took what you had for granted until it was no longer yours. This, it seemed to her, was one of the crueller paradoxes of human nature. -- Ann Brashares
This body is breaking down, but I am not. -- Ann Brashares
Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it. -- Ann Brashares
She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn't. You didn't know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn't know how strong you were. -- Ann Brashares
She had never had a boy talk to her like that. There was no cover of bullshit, no flirtation, no added charm, but his look was searing. He was different from anyone she had known. -- Ann Brashares
My household is, in a nice way, very busy. -- Ann Brashares
What's the occasion?" she asked.
He kissed her ear. "I've got a gorgeous woman who's going to be my bride."
She laughed. "You have that every night."
"That's why I want to celebrate. -- Ann Brashares
Don't talk to me. I'm tired and grumpy and I'll probably make fun of you. -- Ann Brashares
I wondered if I was an error of God's planning that would be fixed at the end of my life. -- Ann Brashares
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 -- Ann Brashares
Time is what keeps things from happening all at once. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
She cared about him too much, and he was a dangerous person to love. He wouldn't love her back. -- Ann Brashares
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
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. -- Ann Brashares
Everything I ever said to you was true and is true. -- Ann Brashares
When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot. -- Ann Brashares
If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death. -- Ann Brashares
Why couldn't it belong to him anymore? Why couldn't he belong to it? Because he gave it up. He held on to himself, and he threw the other things away. -- Ann Brashares
Nobody bothered with him. His failures were private and invisible -- Ann Brashares
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
There was one thing Bridget like about guys. They took insults well. -- Ann Brashares
Why not celebrate what you had had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There
could be joy in things that ended. -- Ann Brashares
The path of your life can change in an instant. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
Some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once. -- Ann Brashares
This was the part of her weekend where the real dread kicked in. -- Ann Brashares
They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age. -- Ann Brashares
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
But why would you wanna break a perfectly good heart? - Taylor Swift -- Ann Brashares
The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it. -- Ann Brashares
Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard. -- Ann Brashares
You don't mean it," he said mournfully. Not at all, she thought. "Yes, I do," she said. -- Ann Brashares
When you belonged nowhere, you sort of belonged everywhere. -- Ann Brashares
There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn't work the way you or most other people thought it did. -- Ann Brashares
I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny -- Ann Brashares
If you didn't have a choice, you have to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let the world happen to you. -- Ann Brashares
Sometimes he felt like the only one on earth. He was different. He always was. His attempts at living in the regular world seemed stupid and false. -- Ann Brashares
Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter) -- Ann Brashares
I tell myself your spirits were down the day you wrote. You're fine and we're fine. I hope it's true. -- Ann Brashares
You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing." - E. B. White -- Ann Brashares
Love didn't necessarily look the way you expected it to. -- Ann Brashares
You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want. -- Ann Brashares
Love is like war; easy to begin, hard to end. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
The forgetting and having to remember again was the very worst part. -- Ann Brashares
He'd given up blessings he hadn't been worthy of for the chance to be with her, and now he'd lost that, too. -- Ann Brashares
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. -- Ann Brashares
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
I wanted to come more than halfway. -- Ann Brashares
I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up. -- Ann Brashares
She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her. -- Ann Brashares
She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew. -- Ann Brashares
Lena felt like a child. Worse than a child and less valuable. She felt like a mouse. No, smaller than a mouse and less alive. Her life seemed so small and crumpled you could shoot it through a straw like a spitball. -- Ann Brashares
I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started. -- Ann Brashares
Sometimes you couldn't face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again. -- Ann Brashares
I agreed sincerely and ardently -- Ann Brashares
She remembered me.' This was his worst weakness, his most toxic drug. -- Ann Brashares
It wasn't meant to work with them, was it? He didn't know if he could try anymore. -- Ann Brashares
They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she. -- Ann Brashares
The world was full of death, full of sadness, full of people, full of people too broken to lean on. -- Ann Brashares
You should find him because he loves you. -- Ann Brashares
Luck never gives; it lends. -- Ann Brashares
Sometimes it is a relief to be invisible -- Ann Brashares
Bridget saw chaos. -- Ann Brashares
Once upon a time there was a pair of pants. -- Ann Brashares
I love her. I need her. I gave away everything I had for her. I just wanted her to know me. -- Ann Brashares
Wish for what you want, work for what you need.
-Carmen's grandmother -- Ann Brashares
Not everyone got a close family. Not everyone needed one. -- Ann Brashares
Marnie loved her better and more honestly than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of her mother, who loved her intensely if not honestly. -- Ann Brashares
No matter how far back you cut a willow tree, it will never really die. -- Ann Brashares
Love yourself and your friends unconditionally . -- Ann Brashares
What business had she to try to capture life and light? -- Ann Brashares
He's had a lot of chances to care, and he hasn't. -- Ann Brashares
For the first time she saw that the nurse's name was Tabitha. -- Ann Brashares
She was so much softer then, so much more willing to fall in love, or believe she was. -- Ann Brashares