Quotes by Ann Brashares

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

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

Love who you love while you have them. Thats all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, youll never run out.

Let me love you, but dont 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.

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.

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

You know what the secret is? Its so simple. We love one another. Were nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen

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.

She knew whose love she doubted. It wasnt her parents and it wasnt her friends: It was her own.

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.

She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.

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.

Maybe happiness didnt 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 didnt matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didnt matter if your friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.

Im afraid of time... I mean, Im afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. Im afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You cant fix them without time. Im afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies.

When she is happy, she cant stop talking, when she is sad she doesnt say a word.

You couldnt erase the past. You couldnt even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.

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.

Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you dont try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.

Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.