Quotes from Ann Brashares

She had to do something. She felt so desperate she couldn't even stand to be in her own skin. She would rather have clubbed herself over the head with her history binder than feel the things she was feeling. This was why she had broken up with him. So she wouldn't have to go through this. The wishing and wanting and not having. Why had it turned out so wrong?

Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly.

A pigeon is the same thing as a dove, did you know that? Bridget

Carmen] knew a worse friend would have made her feel better.

There are some people who fall in love over and over." Tibby nodded, understanding the particular melancholy as it revealed itself on Lena's face. "And there are others who can only seem to do it once.

Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but never made progress

She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn't. You didn't know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn't know how strong you were.

teenagers and toddlers were very much the same. They both liked to leave their mother, so long as their mother did not move.

This was the part of her weekend where the real dread kicked in.

What was powerful at thirteen and seventeen should have grown quaint by twenty-four, and yet the covenant, by its nature had durability. It still existed between them. He could feel it even now. You could go away for months and years, but it was still here, bound to what you loved, binding you to it.

Anatole and I had barely kissed. Most couples in the history of the world had barely kissed. It's when the world changed and people started doing everything else, that's when everybody got divorced.

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.

Tibby, on the other hand, had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with Brian striving for the comfort of not knowing.

Intimacy came faster when a person wore their pain and poor luck for all to see.

d it was true she experienced even the strongest pleasures and poignancies down pretty deep. They tended not to make it all the way up to her face. [Lena]

I'm afraid of the quick judgements and mistakes that everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies

What was this compulsive need to be loveable?

Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. Then you didn't want it anymore. You took what you had for granted until it was no longer yours. This, it seemed to her, was one of the crueller paradoxes of human nature.

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.

looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful.

On that fateful night they'd had sex, it seemed to her that she'd fallen asleep one person and woken up another. She couldn't remember the hows and whys of who she used to be. It was bewildering. Like hypnosis or a magic spell or a dream that had broken on her waking.

Once upon a time there was a pair of pants.

she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.

Sometimes trust felt like the worst gift in the world.