Ann Brashares Quotes

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

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.

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

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

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 expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

When you open yourself to somebody, when you feel these thing that you feel, well, what do you do? You can try to ignore it, maybe you can try to forget about it, but you can't undo it and you can't give it back.

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.

When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.

Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.

Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you'll never run out.

some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.

You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love one another. We're nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen

He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.

She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own.

He loved her for being so beautiful, and he hated her for it. He loved how she put shiny stuff on her lips for him, and he also reviled her for it. He wanted her to walk home alone, and he wanted to run after her and grab her up before she could take another step.

She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.

I'm afraid of time... I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies.

When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word.

You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.

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.