Top 300 Ann Brashares Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Tibby, you are crazy,” Carmen said. “Those pants are in love with you. They want you for your body and your mind.” She couldn’t help seeing the pants in a completely new way.”

— Ann Brashares

202. “Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.”

— Ann Brashares

203. “He could lose himself in her forever, he thought.”

— Ann Brashares

204. “You are not going to die, I know I said I’d let you, but I can’t.”

— Ann Brashares

205. “Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.”

— Ann Brashares

206. “The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn’t see it.”

— Ann Brashares

207. “It was a strange thing about college. You felt like you were supposed to be finding your life there. Each person you saw, you thought, “Will you mean something to me? Will we figure into each other’s lives?”

— Ann Brashares

208. “This body is breaking down, but I am not.”

— Ann Brashares

209. “Someday was the thing he had, because it was a lot harder to ruin than today.”

— Ann Brashares

210. “She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. There were plenty of things she would like to look back on but wasn’t willing to risk...”

— Ann Brashares

211. “The real lesson embodied in Katherine’s three-year-old frame was the opposite: Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.”

— Ann Brashares

212. “A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn’t pull forth any one strand.”

— Ann Brashares

213. “I knew her hair and her coloring and her shapes would be different next time, but the way she wore her body would keep on.”

— Ann Brashares

214. “There are going to be moments of deep, deep doubts, and you have to have faith that your initial idea was good and just muddle through.”

— Ann Brashares

215. “There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn’t work the way you or most other people thought it did.”

— Ann Brashares

216. “Lena remembered herself in all the old familiar things they said. 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

217. “But then she hadn’t just learned to love this summer – she had also learned how to need.”

— Ann Brashares

218. “What if people knew they were recycled? Would that change anything?”

— Ann Brashares

219. “It’s natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily most gracefully. So here’s me asking you to please not make that mistake.”

— Ann Brashares

220. “There was one thing Bridget like about guys. They took insults well.”

— Ann Brashares

221. “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

222. “It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didn’t come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you weren’t ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal.”

— Ann Brashares

223. “It was amazing, really, the effort that went into the absence of things.”

— Ann Brashares

224. “She could sit here and cry for as long as she liked. She could crawl under the desk. She could run around in the parking lot. She could live big. She could make herself to do things that were hard. She could.”

— Ann Brashares

225. “My household is, in a nice way, very busy.”

— Ann Brashares

226. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

227. “How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.”

— Ann Brashares

228. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

229. “In this present body he hadn’t been loved, and he found almost nothing to love about himself.”

— Ann Brashares

230. “She was never going to be the kind of person who didn’t stick out in all directions. To want it was the same as hating herself. That was the truth. She breathed those words. She could have repeated them a hundred times and they wouldn’t have hurt any worse. Reality was stubborn for sure, but it was large and it had possibilities. It was a sweet relief when you let it come.”

— Ann Brashares

231. “The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford.”

— Ann Brashares

232. “As much as I’m drawn to writing about teenage girls, I like the idea of having the freedom to branch out and write about different ages, for different ages.”

— Ann Brashares

233. “He didn’t seem to realize that three excuses was as good as no excuse.”

— Ann Brashares

234. “It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.”

— Ann Brashares

235. “She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn’t. You didn’t know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn’t know how strong you were.”

— Ann Brashares

236. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

237. “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.”

— Ann Brashares

238. “Because they forgot and I remembered. They would be lost soon enough, and I would keep going. The best I could do was hold on to them after they forgot themselves.”

— Ann Brashares

239. “She wasn’t as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she’d slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts.”

— Ann Brashares

240. “She’d loved him as much as he’d let her. More than he’d let her.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

242. “The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it.”

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

244. “It’s always nervewracking to put yourself out there. But it’s the root of joy.”

— Ann Brashares

245. “He no longer represented someday a possibility. He represented a road not taken a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn’t see it anymore.”

— Ann Brashares

246. “People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight – at least as the normally experienced them.”

— Ann Brashares

247. “I love her. I need her. I gave away everything I had for her. I just wanted her to know me.”

— Ann Brashares

248. “He’s had a lot of chances to care, and he hasn’t.”

— Ann Brashares

249. “But there were times when you felt miserable and you wanted to feel better, and other times when you felt miserable and you figured you would just keep on feeling miserable.”

— Ann Brashares

250. “You should find him because he loves you.”

— Ann Brashares