Top 100 Ann Brashares Quotes
#1. Marnie hated to see her spend so much of herself on someone who didn't care.
Ann Brashares
#2. 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
#4. 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
#5. Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.
Ann Brashares
#6. 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
#7. Why do we fight the things we fight when giving into them isn't so bad at all?
Ann Brashares
#8. 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
#9. Time was moving backward, it seemed, and the future was mostly forgotten.
Ann Brashares
#10. There are some people who fall in love over and over.
Ann Brashares
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Girls who wouldn't take risks both loved and hated girls who did. Bridget
Ann Brashares
#15. You Could Only See As Far As Your Headlights, But You Can Make Your Whole Trip That Way
Ann Brashares
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I guess I was better at loving then, too, and also better at being loved - the two go together.
Ann Brashares
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Each of these moments was a pearl on a string, one prettier and more perfect than the next.
Ann Brashares
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I did love her. I've loved her from the first time I saw her.
Ann Brashares
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Like why Lena always thought of Ritz crackers when she shaved her legs. Who knew why? And did it even matter?
Ann Brashares
#32. 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
#33. As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
Ann Brashares
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. But certain souls cohere. It's rare but possible. But it takes two powerful wills to make it so.
Ann Brashares
#37. I wondered if I was an error of God's planning that would be fixed at the end of my life.
Ann Brashares
#38. 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
#39. His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.
Ann Brashares
#40. You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing." - E. B. White
Ann Brashares
#41. When life gives you lemons, say, "yeah I like lemons, what else ya got"?
Ann Brashares
#42. What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.
Ann Brashares
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Sometimes you need to make a mess. -Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeper
Ann Brashares
#46. The forgetting and having to remember again was the very worst part.
Ann Brashares
#47. She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.
Ann Brashares
#48. Nobody bothered with him. His failures were private and invisible
Ann Brashares
#49. 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
#50. He'd pushed her. He'd scared her. He'd besieged her. He'd vowed he wouldn't, and he did.
Ann Brashares
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.
Ann Brashares
#54. You carry your past with you even if you don't remember any of it.
Ann Brashares
#55. 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
#56. I've always feared she would find completion without me, and I'd be around, stupid and unperfected, forever.
Ann Brashares
#57. 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
#58. What can I say? I'm obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can't be held responsible for our actions.
Ann Brashares
#59. The world was full of death, full of sadness, full of people, full of people too broken to lean on.
Ann Brashares
#61. A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting.
Ann Brashares
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. There was love expressed in the places you usually forget to look.
Ann Brashares
#67. 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
#68. No matter how it felt to be near him, she had to keep her swollen heart in check.
Ann Brashares
#69. 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
#70. 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
#72. The dreams weren't as pleasing when they had no chance of coming true
Ann Brashares
#73. They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age.
Ann Brashares
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Hey," he said. "It's someday." He said the last word in Greek.
Ann Brashares
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. A lot of irrational behavior would look more rational if you could see it in the context of your whole long life.
Ann Brashares
#80. 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
#81. Life isn't just fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. -William Goldman
Ann Brashares
#82. Wish for what you want, work for what you need.
-Carmen's grandmother
Ann Brashares
#83. 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
#84. She was back on the ground, looking down at the bugs rather than up at the sky.
Ann Brashares
#85. 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
#86. I agree that a love of reading is a great gift for a parent to pass on to his or her child.
Ann Brashares
#87. Where there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.
Ann Brashares
#88. I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.
Ann Brashares
#89. 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
#90. She hadn't chosen the brave life. She'd chosen the small, fearful one.
Ann Brashares
#91. What business had she to try to capture life and light?
Ann Brashares
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.
Ann Brashares
#96. 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
#97. She was so much softer then, so much more willing to fall in love, or believe she was.
Ann Brashares
#98. 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
#99. There was one thing Bridget like about guys. They took insults well.
Ann Brashares
#100. The phone was her worst enemy and her best friend but she never knew which until she answered it.
Ann Brashares
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