Quotes from Ann Brashares

You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.

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.

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

She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn't be. Oh, well.

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

Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.

Daniel? Yes. Did you ever think we were meant not to be together? No. We are meant to be together. We are just meant to want it very badly.

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

Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.

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.

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.

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.

Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.

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

It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didn't come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you weren't ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal.

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.

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.

Love didn't necessarily look the way you expected it to.

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.

You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.

She got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted.

The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.

She wanted him to notice her so much.

I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.