Ann Brashares Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Love yourself and your friends unconditionally .

Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile

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.

I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.

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

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.

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.

When there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Every life I start with her, my original sin. I know myself through her.

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.

Luck never gives; it lends.

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

Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.

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.

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

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

Something about giving in without a fight felt wrong.

Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain.

How is it that a person could be so relieved and so disappointed, both at the same time.

But like everything else, love changed.

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.

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.

Hey," he said. "It's someday." He said the last word in Greek.

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