Ann Brashares
She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Mistake
She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.Collection: Heart
He had to fight. That's all he had. Not memories, not experiences, not skills. He had a will. And his will was to fight until he couldn't fight anymore.Collection: Memories
If you didn't have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let this world happen to you... he didn't see eternity. He saw this girl and this moment and this one slim chance.Collection: Girl
What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.Collection: People
For some reason our lives were marked by summers. . . . Summer was the time when our lives joined completely, when we all had our birthdays, when really important things happenedCollection: Summer
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.Collection: Writing
Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it's really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Moving
I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.Collection: Past
Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.Collection: Grief
I dont really write with the idea of trying to teach any lessons. I want to tell a story as truthfully and engagingly as I can, and then let the chips fall where they may.Collection: Fall
When there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.Collection: Possibility
I love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way.Collection: Ideas
I love that blurry place where life’s transitions are made without you even knowing it.Collection: Knowing
A lot of friendship is about practice, that’s something I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. It’s not simply some spiritual soul-bond of memories and longings, it’s really about having coffee every week, or talking on the phone every day or every other day - whatever suits you.Collection: Spiritual
Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.Collection: Character
I think pants have unique qualities, especially in a woman’s life. Whatever bodily insecurities we have, we seem to take out on our pants.Collection: Unique
Love yourself and your friends unconditionally .Collection: Love You
How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?Collection: Reflection
She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.Collection: Littles
Honesty was a tough customer... Once you started allowing yourself some honesty, it couldn't easily be contained or limited to one part of your life. It was like poison ivy or a bossy houseguest. Once it was there, you couldn't tell it what to do. You had to really fight to keep it from taking over.Collection: Honesty
His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.Collection: Children
She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Kids
Carmen hated the 'life is too short" rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because "life is too short not to," you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.Collection: Life Is Too Short
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.Collection: Feelings
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.Collection: Sunshine
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.Collection: Ocean
All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.Collection: Looks
Love didn't necessarily look the way you expected it to.Collection: Looks
One must have a good memory to keep the promises one has made.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Father
Sometimes you couldn’t face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.Collection: Sadness
It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans.Collection: Mother
There was one thing Bridget like about guys. They took insults well.Collection: Guy
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.Collection: Hurt
What can I say? I'm obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can't be held responsible for our actions.Collection: Girl
And I thought about the color and I realized what blue it was. It was the soft and changeable, essential blue of a well-worn pair of pants. Pants = LoveCollection: Blue
It's always nervewracking to put yourself out there. But it's the root of joy.Collection: Roots
Sometimes you need to make a mess. -Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeperCollection: Needs
There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone. The very act of caring made them impossible to regain.Collection: Caring
Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.Collection: Fall
It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Long
Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what precious gifts they would ever get.Collection: People
I love her. I need her. I gave away everything I had for her. I just wanted her to know me.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Soul