Ann Brashares Quotes

Ann Brashares

Biography

Type: Writer of young adult fiction

Born: July 30, 1967

Died:

Ann Brashares grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with three brothers and attended a Quaker school in the D.C. area called Sidwell Friends.

Ann Brashares Quotes

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

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.

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

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

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.

When you open yourself to somebody, when you feel these thing that you feel, well, what do you do? You can try to ignore it, maybe you can try to forget about it, but you can't undo it and you can't give it back.

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.

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

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.

Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you'll never run out.

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

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

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.

He loved her for being so beautiful, and he hated her for it. He loved how she put shiny stuff on her lips for him, and he also reviled her for it. He wanted her to walk home alone, and he wanted to run after her and grab her up before she could take another step.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.

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.

If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death.

You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.

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

They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age.

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.

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?

Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms.

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

Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.

Not everyone got a close family. Not everyone needed one.

Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed.

The path of your life can change in an instant.

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

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

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.

They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she.

We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real.

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.

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.

...he had found the courage once in his life to seize a chance at love from a person who knew how to give it. Lena prayed on these two moons that she would find that same courage.

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

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