Ann Brashares Quotes

“I killed her once and died for her many times”

“Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.”

“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.”

“I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.”

“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.”

“Can you make yourself love? Can you make yourself loved?
-Lena Kaligaris”

“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.”

“Maybe, sometimes, it's easier to be mad at the people you trust because you know they'll always love you, no matter what.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.”

“Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.”

“When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word.”

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

“Don't talk to me. I'm tired and grumpy and I'll probably make fun of you.”

“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.”

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

“There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.”

“When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.”

“Your problem isn't the problem, it's your attitude about the problem.”

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

“What can I say? I'm obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can't be held responsible for our actions.”

“Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.”

“She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn't sure who'd broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly.”

“you remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you.”

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.”

“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.”

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

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

“How many times could you give up on someone you loved?”

“Sometimes you couldn’t face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.”

“It was wrong. But it was worth it.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?”

“Wish for what you want, work for what you need.
-Carmen's grandmother”

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

“Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

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

“She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.”

“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.”

“You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”