Ann Brashares Quotes

How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?

His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.

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.

But it was smell that carried memory.

She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own.

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.

some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.

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

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.

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

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

Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile

Love yourself and your friends unconditionally .

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I did love her. I've loved her from the first time I saw her.

This body is breaking down, but I am not.

Pain is fear, and I'm not afraid.

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.

She'd loved him as much as he'd let her. More than he'd let her.

Someday was the thing he had, because it was a lot harder to ruin than today.

She wanted him to notice her so much.

I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.

All I could think to do was love her. That's all a person can do.

He could lose himself in her forever, he thought.

You should find him because he loves you.

Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

Love didn't necessarily look the way you expected it to.

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

She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew.

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.

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.

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.