Top 300 Ann Brashares Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.”

— Ann Brashares

102. “She hadn’t chosen the brave life. She’d chosen the small, fearful one.”

— Ann Brashares

103. “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

104. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

105. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

108. “Wear them, they will make you brave.”

— Ann Brashares

109. “There are moments in your life when the big pieces slide and shift. Sometimes the big changes dong happen gradually but all at once. That’s how it was for us. That was the day we discovered that friends can do things for you that your parents can’t.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

111. “What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.”

— Ann Brashares

112. “Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but it never made any progress. Later she remembered thinking that a normal person might have begun by saying that he was like the beach.”

— Ann Brashares

113. “How many times could you give up on someone you loved?”

— Ann Brashares

114. “But it was smell that carried memory.”

— Ann Brashares

115. “Carmen: “I want you to leave me alone, but not ignore me. I want you to miss me when I go away to college, but not be sad. I want you to stay exactly the same, but not be lonely or alone. I want to do the leaving, and not have you ever leave me.”

— Ann Brashares

116. “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

117. “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

118. “Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

120. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

121. “There was a moment in between, a moment flung free in the midst of the transition, when he made contact. That was the moment she would dwell on.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

123. “Forget Jack, I’m in love with the cold, dirt floor.”

— Ann Brashares

124. “It was wrong. But it was worth it.”

— Ann Brashares

125. “Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.”

— Ann Brashares

126. “Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks. The traffic signal that said walk the second you got there, that happened to every person in the course of a day.”

— Ann Brashares

127. “She could understand and analyze and predict the exact outcome of her crazy, self-destructive behavior and then go ahead and do it anyway.”

— Ann Brashares

128. “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

129. “She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?”

— Ann Brashares

130. “She discarded whole chunks of life that obsessed other people. She didn’t torture people she loved, nor did she hunger for them. She kept it simple.”

— Ann Brashares

131. “You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.”

— Ann Brashares

132. “In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt read. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by own fears and wants. And who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.”

— Ann Brashares

133. “Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn’t easily cross.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

135. “It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.”

— Ann Brashares

136. “Maybe we tried so hard to be like the Sisterhood because it was easy for them and we wanted it to be easy for us. Because they were lucky and we wanted to be lucky too. They had wonder, and we didn’t have any. We looked for the magic, but we didn’t fine it. We waited for the magic, but it didn’t find us.”

— Ann Brashares

137. “Why does he have to be my boyfriend? Are you inferior if you don’t have a boyfriend? Why does everybody have to be in love with somebody?”

— Ann Brashares

138. “She was so much softer then, so much more willing to fall in love, or believe she was.”

— Ann Brashares

139. “She wanted him to notice her so much.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

141. “Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.”

— Ann Brashares

142. “Could she kiss him? Would he allow her that? Was that something he could pretend was nothing? What about making love? Could she just open up her legs and pull him inside her and have him all she wanted and later give her assent that it was nothing?”

— Ann Brashares

143. “I killed her once and died for her many times.”

— Ann Brashares

144. “That seemed a sad thing about human nature – how much more time we spend thinking about what we don’ have, or have lost, than about what we have.”

— Ann Brashares

145. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

146. “Carmen didn’t like change, and she certainly didn’t like endings.”

— Ann Brashares

147. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

148. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

149. “I don’t have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I’ve been able to connect with a lot of people.”

— Ann Brashares

150. “How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?”

— Ann Brashares