Top 284 Quotes & Sayings by Ann Brashares

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

My household is, in a nice way, very busy.

When I turned fifteen, I remember my father gave me a credit card which I was allowed to use for two things: emergencies and books.

As much as I'm drawn to writing about teenage girls, I like the idea of having the freedom to branch out and write about different ages, for different ages.

Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.

I agree that a love of reading is a great gift for a parent to pass on to his or her child.

As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.

I look back on my 20s. It's supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you're making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.

The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.

A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

It's so much easier to have no expectations than to have big ones.

I don't have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I've been able to connect with a lot of people.

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.

Everything good requires sacrifices.

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

I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it.

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

Don't talk to me. I'm tired and grumpy and I'll probably make fun of you.

There was love expressed in the places you usually forget to look.

You are not going to die, I know I said I'd let you, but I can't.

There are moments in your life when the big pieces slide and shift. Sometimes the big changes dong happen gradually but all at once. That's how it was for us. That was the day we discovered that friends can do things for you that your parents can't.

She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big. As big as she could. She promised Bailey she would keep playing.

Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.

As the three of them walked home from the trees, nobody needed to say it, but Ama knew. They had questioned their friendship. They had searched and wondered, looking for a sign. And all along they'd had their trees. You couldn't wear them. You couldn't pass them around. They offered no fashion advantage. But they had roots. They lived.

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.

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.

It wasn't just that Lucy wanted to help him. She wasn't as selfless as that. She was madly attracted to him. She was attracted to all of the normal things and the weird things, too, like the back of his neck and his thumbs on the edge of his desk and the way his hair stuck out on one side like a little wing over his ear. She caught his smell once, and it made her dizzy. She couldn't fall asleep that night.

There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him.

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 they normally experienced them....Some people lost their individuality in the water, but Riley always felt most herself. Water was supposed to symbolize renewal, she knew, but when Riley swam, pared down, alone, and unreachable--she felt a deeper sense of who she already was.

Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.

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

The path of your life can change in an instant.

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

He didn't seem to realize that three excuses was as good as no excuse.

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

When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

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's had a lot of chances to care, and he hasn't.

Every life I start with her, my original sin. I know myself through her.

You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.

When your about to criticize someone walk a mile in thier shoes, that way when you criticize them you're a mile away from them and you have their shoes

If you ever meet a guy and you fall in love with him, but because of some weird genetic mutation he doesn't seem to return the feeling?... Wear that dress.

But certain souls cohere. It's rare but possible. But it takes two powerful wills to make it so.

She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time

Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things.

The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem. Got that? -Coach Brevin

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.

The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn’t see it.

Marnie loved her better and more honestly than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of her mother, who loved her intensely if not honestly.

I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny

She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.

There are some people who fall in love over and over.

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

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

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.

Tibby's wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.

Luck never gives; it lends.