Ann brashares quotes

It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Something about giving in without a fight felt wrong.

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.

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

Bridget's anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and contolled it, whereas the sadness owned her.

She couldn’t hide from everyone for the rest of her life… Well she could. That was the direction things were going. But she knew from long-ago experience that when you were uncertain and if you were courageous enough to let her in a real friend could do a world of good.

She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.

People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it.

He took her hand and they started walking toward the baggage claim. They didn't say anything to each other. They swung their held hands like little kids, like they believed anything could happen, like they might take off soaring into the air. All the things you wanted to happen could happen. Why not?

I'm writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don't think I can say it. I'm not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I'm doing it to thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you.

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.

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

She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.

It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give." (Lena, 194)

I love her. I need her. I gave away everything I had for her. I just wanted her to know me.

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

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. I'm afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies.

The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem. Got that? -Coach Brevin

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

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

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same." (Lena, 211)

Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.

Tibby was shaking her head. "What?" Bailey asked. "Nothing. Just that you suprise me every day," Tibby said. Bailey smiled at her. "I like that you let yourself be suprised.

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.

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

A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.

She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.

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.

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

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

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

But then she hadn’t just learned to love this summer – she had also learned how to need.

Shy” was the sympathetic interpretation she got from older people. “Snotty” was the interpretation she got from people her own age.

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

He took her in his arms right away. "I'm so sorry," he murmured in her ear. He rocked her, saying it over and over. But no matter how many times he said it, no matter how much she knew he meant it, the words stirred around in her ear but didn't get into her brain. Sometimes he could comfort her. Sometimes he said what she needed, but today he couldn't reach her. Nothing could.

Tibby's wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.

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

You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.

Blood may be thicker than water, but friendship is thicker than both.

Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what precious gifts they would ever get.

She got under the covers and put her arms around the bag. She could smell Tibby. It used to be she couldn't smell Tibby's smell in the way you couldn't smell your own; it was too familiar. But tonight she could. This was some living part of Tibby still here and she held on to it. There was more of Tibby with her here and now than in what she had seen in the cold basement room that day.

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

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.

You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love one another. We're nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen

When your about to criticize someone walk a mile in thier shoes, that way when you criticize them you're a mile away from them and you have their shoes

He's had a lot of chances to care, and he hasn't.

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

The path of your life can change in an instant.

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

You should find him because he loves you.

The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn’t see it.

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.

There was love expressed in the places you usually forget to look.

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.

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 look back on my 20s. It's supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you're making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.

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

I’m sorry you asked me out, otherwise maybe I could have liked you.

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.

Everything good requires sacrifices.

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

I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

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

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

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.

You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful pieve of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want. -pg276

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

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.

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 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.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans.

The dreams weren’t as pleasing when they had no chance of coming true

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.

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.

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.

She hadn't chosen the brave life. She'd chosen the small, fearful one.

Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself. ... As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product.

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.

Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.

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

People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight--at least as they normally experienced them....Some people lost their individuality in the water, but Riley always felt most herself. Water was supposed to symbolize renewal, she knew, but when Riley swam, pared down, alone, and unreachable--she felt a deeper sense of who she already was.

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

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

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.

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

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

I like that you let yourself be surprised

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

She remembered me.' This was his worst weakness, his most toxic drug.

Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. 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.

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?

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

Sometimes it is a relief to be invisible

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

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

Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.

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

He didn't seem to realize that three excuses was as good as no excuse.

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

I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny

Besides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. 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.

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.

So far, she’d been her usual lame self: solitary and routine-loving, carefully avoiding any path that might lead to spontaneous human interaction. Lena Kaligaris

Love is like war; easy to begin, hard to end.

At the worst possible moment, the most painful, darkest moment when you can't take it anymore and you are afraid, that is when a feeling of peace and comfort will come over you, and it's like nothing you've ever felt.

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

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

We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.

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

There are some people who fall in love over and over.

I killed her once and died for her many times

Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things.

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

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.