Ann Brashares Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

Looking back, it was the thing in his life that shamed him the most: the times he was purposefully, calculatingly mean to Alice. It was those moments, and there had been many of them, that indicated to him that he was not a good person. He got mad at her for many things, but it was always really for the same thing: that she possessed his love and he couldn't seem to get it back. She didn't deserve it, which was to say she deserved better

Ann Brashares
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?

Ann Brashares
As the three of them walked home from the trees, nobody needed to say it, but Ama knew. They had questioned their friendship. They had searched and wondered, looking for a sign. And all along they'd had their trees. You couldn't wear them. You couldn't pass them around. They offered no fashion advantage. But they had roots. They lived.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.

Ann Brashares
She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn't be. Oh, well.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
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

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

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

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

Ann Brashares
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.

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

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still.

Ann Brashares
Marnie hated to see her spend so much of herself on someone who didn't care.

Ann Brashares
She had never had a boy talk to her like that. There was no cover of bullshit, no flirtation, no added charm, but his look was searing. He was different from anyone she had known.

Ann Brashares
Marnie loved her better and more honestly than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of her mother, who loved her intensely if not honestly.

Ann Brashares
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.

Ann Brashares
She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were.

Ann Brashares
It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

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

Ann Brashares