Top 300 Ann Brashares Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny.”

— Ann Brashares

52. “I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.”

— Ann Brashares

53. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

54. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

55. “Fine, blood was thicker than water. But friendship, it struck Tibby, was thicker than both.”

— Ann Brashares

56. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

58. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

59. “I’m dying with you before I’m living without you.”

— Ann Brashares

60. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

61. “You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.”

— Ann Brashares

62. “Sometimes you couldn’t face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.”

— Ann Brashares

63. “Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn’t matter if you friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.”

— Ann Brashares

64. “Can you make yourself love? Can you make yourself loved? -Lena Kaligaris.”

— Ann Brashares

65. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

66. “The most haunting thing was not that he didn’t love her anymore. She could have accepted that eventually. The most haunting thing was that he did. He loved her from afar. He loved her in a way that was preserved in time, that couldn’t be sullied. And she tended it in her careful, curatorial way.”

— Ann Brashares

67. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

68. “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

69. “No matter how far back you cut a willow tree, it will never really die.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

71. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

73. “Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.”

— Ann Brashares

74. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

75. “What can I say? I’m obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can’t be held responsible for our actions.”

— Ann Brashares

76. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

77. “You just have to let people love you in the way they can.”

— Ann Brashares

78. “Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn’t get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn’t escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison.”

— Ann Brashares

79. “Maybe the truth is there’s a little bit of loser in all of us you know, being happy isn’t having everything in your life being perfect. Maybe it’s about stringing together all the little things. Making those count more then the bad stuff. Maybe we just get through it and that’s all we can ask for.”

— Ann Brashares

80. “I mean putting yourself out there in the way of overwhelming happiness and knowing you’re also putting yourself in the way of terrible harm. I’m scared to be this happy. I’m scared to be this extreme.”

— Ann Brashares

81. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

82. “I agree that a love of reading is a great gift for a parent to pass on to his or her child.”

— Ann Brashares

83. “She cared about him too much, and he was a dangerous person to love. He wouldn’t love her back.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

85. “But certain souls cohere. It’s rare but possible. But it takes two powerful wills to make it so.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

88. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

89. “She was supposed to be putting her life together right now, and all she could seem to do was throw grenades at it.”

— Ann Brashares

90. “For the first time she saw that the nurse’s name was Tabitha.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

92. “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

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

— Ann Brashares

94. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

95. “I think pants have unique qualities, especially in a woman’s life. Whatever bodily insecurities we have, we seem to take out on our pants.”

— Ann Brashares

96. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

97. “Love yourself and your friends unconditionally .”

— Ann Brashares

98. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

99. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

100. “Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it’s really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something.”

— Ann Brashares