Quotes from Ann Brashares

I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.

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

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.

Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.

Maybe they would look at each other and feel some odd yearning, but neither of them would know why. They would want to stop, but they would be embarrassed, and neither would know what to say. They would go their separate ways. Who knew? Maybe that happened every day to people who'd once loved each other.

Can you make yourself love? Can you make yourself loved? -Lena Kaligaris

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

It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.

Maybe the truth is there's a little bit of loser in all of us you know, being happy isn't having everything in your life being perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things. Making those count more then the bad stuff. Maybe we just get through it and that's all we can ask for.

She had to have faith not just in trying but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail Was she strong enough not to

She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were.

Hey, he said. It's someday. He said the last word in Greek.

People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same. (Lena, 211)

He no longer represented someday a possibility. He represented a road not taken a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn't see it anymore.

She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.

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

I want to go where you're going. I'm not scared of dying. I want to stay together and come back together. You said that souls cohere. I want to stay with you.

She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn't have it. Why did she always feel she had to do something in the face of beauty?

It was probably good you couldn't flip the love switch because sometimes it was what you needed even if you didn't want it.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

She closed her eyes. I didn't know that. i didn't know anything. It scares me the things I told myself. But I would have told myself almost anything, because I wanted to believe him. Why? Because I wanted to be with you.

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.

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 need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

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