Quotes by Ann Brashares

“Maybe you think youll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesnt work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. Its by living that you live m...”

“Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.”

“You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things”

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

“She didn't open the envelope until she'd gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadn't given her the thousand dollars she'd asked for-he'd given her ten thousand.”

“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 the...”

“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 rea...”

“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.”

“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 nee...”

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

“You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she fe...”

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

“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.”

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

“I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers e...”

“Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.”