Quotes by Ann Brashares

Lena, listen to me, okay? We dont have much more time here. You are in love. Ive never seen anything like this before. You have to be brave, okay? You have to go and tell Kostos how you feel. I swear to God if you dont, you will regret it for the rest of your cowardly life.What if he doesnt like me back?Thats what I mean about being brave.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her poor, sad mother, whod missed everything.

Someday when youre twenty, maybe, Ill see you again. Youll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? Ill see you and Ill pray you want me still.

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.

I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.

Show me a girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and Ill show you a girl who cant put her pants on.-Annik Marchand

I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.

Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldnt spend on their own absent children and grandchildren.

His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.

How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?

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.

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.

Lena felt like a child. Worse than a child and less valuable. She felt like a mouse. No, smaller than a mouse and less alive. Her life seemed so small and crumpled you could shoot it through a straw like a spitball.

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.

I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You cant make yourself love someone, can you?

Alice suspected Paul couldn’t really picture his father, just like she couldn’t picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.

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

You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. Shed held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years shed been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.