Ann Brashares Quotes

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“A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 wanted him to notice her so much.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I always search for her; I always remember her. I carry the hope that someday she will remember me.”

“Rule #1: The customer is always right. Rule #2: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule #1.
-Duncan Howe”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sometimes you need to make a mess.
-Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeper”

“She wasn’t sure if he wanted more from her or if he wanted less. Maybe it was both. Maybe it was always both.”

“Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter)”

“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.”

“I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny”

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

“Luck never gives; it lends.”

“I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.”

“Do you have any idea how much I've loved you?”

“What if people knew they were recycled? Would that change anything?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Wear them, they will make you brave.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But certain souls cohere. It's rare but possible. But it takes two powerful wills to make it so.”

“You are not going to die, I know I said I'd let you, but I can't.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“when life gives you lemons, say, "yeah I like lemons, what else ya got"?”

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

“You should find him because he loves you.”

“Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must.”

“Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.”

“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.”

“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”

“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?”