Quotes by Ann Brashares

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

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.

It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didnt. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didnt. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldnt stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.

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

Maybe the truth is, theres a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isnt having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe its about stringing together all the little things.

Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.

She didnt open the envelope until shed gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadnt given her the thousand dollars shed asked for-hed given her ten thousand.

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.

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

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. Ive learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I dont think of and take them to places I cant go.

You dont have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you dont have what you want now, you dont have what you want.

They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age.

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

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.

They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she.

Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.

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

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

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