Ann Brashares citations

Page 2

“Elle errait le coeur brisé, sans savoir qui le lui avait brisé. Elle avait dû se le briser toute seule, conclut-elle.”

“Pourquoi toutes les mères étaient-elles si impatientes que leurs filles aient un petit ami? Comme si la vraie vie ne commençait qu'avec les garçons.”

“Finalement, ce n'est peut-être pas la corruption ni l'avidité qui rend lâche. Peut-être n'est-ce ni la faiblesse ni la souffrance ni même la peur. Peut-être est-ce simplement l'amour”

“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?”

“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.”

“You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.”

“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”

“I love you, I'll never stop.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”