Ann Brashares Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

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're the Septembers now. The real ones. We are everything to one another. We don't need to say so; it's just true. Sometimes it seems like we're so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones. We settle into types- Bridget the athlete, Lena the beauty, Tibby the rebel, and me, Carmen, the...what? The one with the bad temper. But the one who cares the most. The one who cares that we stick together.

I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can't make yourself love someone, can you?

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

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

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.

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?

She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own.

Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes.

My mother says it can't stay like this, but I believe it will. The Pants are like an omen. They stand for the promise we made to one another, that no matter what happens, we stick together. But they stand for a challenge too. It's not enough to stay in Bethesda, Maryland, and hunker down in air-conditioned houses. We promise one another that someday we'd get out in the world and figure some stuff out.

Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly.

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.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.

[Carmen] knew a worse friend would have made her feel better.

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.

Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought.

I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.

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.

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.

The weather turned. Her skin seemed to grow a million extra pores, and all of them opened to take in the warmth and tenderness of the air. The sun on her face made her want to cry. Into all those millions of open pores came the sunshine, and other feelings as well. In and out. She was porous.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

sometimes you need to make a mess.

Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go. 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. maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.

The path of your life can change in an instant.

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

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

Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down there on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him.

Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. Then you didn’t want it anymore. You took what you had for granted until it was no longer yours. This, it seemed to her, was one of the crueller paradoxes of human nature.

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.

Tibby, on the other hand, had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with Brian striving for the comfort of not knowing.

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

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.

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

Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldn't spend on their own absent children and grandchildren.

It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him contentedly munching on his Rice Krispies, waiting for the right juncture for launchtime.He looked up at her briefly and smiled, and she realized something important. This was how they both liked it. Though most people felt bonded by conversation, Lena and Bapi were two of a kind who didn’t. They bonded by the routine of just eating cereal together.She promptly forgot her script and went back to her cereal.At one point, when she was down to just milk, Bapi reached over and put his hand on hers. ‘You’re my girl,’ he said.And Lena knew she was.

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

There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn't quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren't under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you'd have to land eventually.

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.