Ann Brashares
What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.Collection: How You Feel
They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.Collection: Self
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.Collection: Law
Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd 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 she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.Collection: Self
She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.Collection: Wish
You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful pieve of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want. -pg276Collection: Beautiful
Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself. ... As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product.Collection: Uncertain
He tricked himself into thinking that she would look into his eyes and remember, that love would conquer all.Collection: Eye
Hey," he said. "It's someday." He said the last word in Greek.Collection: Greek
She remembered me.' This was his worst weakness, his most toxic drug.Collection: Drug
Something about giving in without a fight felt wrong.Collection: Fighting
She cared about him too much, and he was a dangerous person to love. He wouldn't love her back.Collection: Too Much
She had never had a boy talk to her like that. There was no cover of bullshit, no flirtation, no added charm, but his look was searing. He was different from anyone she had known.Collection: Boys
Do you have any idea how much I've loved you?Collection: Ideas
Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain.Collection: Running
How is it that a person could be so relieved and so disappointed, both at the same time.Collection: Relieved
But like everything else, love changed.Collection: Changed
He'd pushed her. He'd scared her. He'd besieged her. He'd vowed he wouldn't, and he did.Collection: Scared
I killed her once and died for her many timesCollection: Died
Bridget's anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and contolled it, whereas the sadness owned her.Collection: Sadness
She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not.Collection: People
She glared at him, feeling the old frustration. Sometimes in his presence she felt the deepest connection to him, and other times she felt completely alone-as though any bond to him was her own bitter imagination.Collection: Frustration
Looking back, it was the thing in his life that shamed him the most: the times he was purposefully, calculatingly mean to Alice. It was those moments, and there had been many of them, that indicated to him that he was not a good person. He got mad at her for many things, but it was always really for the same thing: that she possessed his love and he couldn't seem to get it back. She didn't deserve it, which was to say she deserved betterCollection: Mean
Polly was pretty good at dieting, all right, but she was beginning to wonder whether you ever lost the parts of your self that you wanted to lose.Collection: Self
Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter)Collection: Daughter
some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Waiting
She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own.Collection: Parent
Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.Collection: Book
During intermission she peeked out at the theater, watching it refill. When it was almost full and the lights blinked on and off, she saw three people file in through the center door and her breath caught. Time lapsed as they walked down the center aisle: three teenage girls all in a row. They were so big, so bright, so beautiful, so magnificent to Carmen’s eyes that she thought she was imagining them. They were like goddesses, like Titans. She was so proud of them! They were benevolent and they were righteous. Now, these were friends.Collection: Beautiful
He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.Collection: Stranger
I love you, I'll never stop.Collection: Love You
She wanted him to see all of her and also none of her. She wanted him to be dazzled by the bits and blinded by the whole. She wanted him to see her whole and not in pieces. She had hopes that were hard to satisfy.Collection: Love
Why does he have to be my boyfriend? Are you inferior if you don't have a boyfriend? Why does everybody have to be in love with somebody?Collection: My Boyfriend
she never showed girly weaknesses like cellulite or crushes. she never lingered on injustices committed against her.Collection: Crush
Maybe, sometimes, it's easier to be mad at the people you trust because you know they'll always love you, no matter what.Collection: Love You
Ruins stood for what was lost, and yet there were beautiful-peaceful, historic, intellectual. Not tragic or regrettable. Lena tried to keep hers that way too, and she succeeded to some extent. Why not celebrate what you had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There could be joy in things that ended.Collection: Beautiful
Riley was quiet for a minute. She gathered her blanket all around her. "Paul always loved you, Alice. He knows I know that. I know he loves me, too. But it's different." Alice opened her mouth, but nothing came out at first. "He loved me once. But I think that part is over," she said slowly. "No, it's not. It hasn't even begun." Riley took Alice's bare foot in her hand and squeezed it. "I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first."Collection: Thinking
Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. "I'm scared... ," she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.Collection: Soup
You'll turn out ordinary if you're not careful.Collection: Ordinary
She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were.Collection: Thinking
Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.Collection: Beautiful
She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?Collection: Years
Wish for what you want, work for what you need. -Carmen's grandmotherCollection: Grandmother
Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Forgotten
Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Strong
She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.Collection: Broken Heart