Ann Brashares

“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.”

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

“Healing wasn’t always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that.”

“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.”

“A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good about yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could flip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct ad had nothing at all to give.”

“Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.”

“Carmen: “I want you to leave me alone, but not ignore me. I want you to miss me when I go away to college, but not be sad. I want you to stay exactly the same, but not be lonely or alone. I want to do the leaving, and not have you ever leave me.”

“You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want.”

“Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.”

“We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real.”

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

“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.”

“He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.”

“You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It`s you who makes me a person.”

“Honesty was a tough customer... Once you started allowing yourself some honesty, it couldn't easily be contained or limited to one part of your life. It was like poison ivy or a bossy houseguest. Once it was there, you couldn't tell it what to do. You had to really fight to keep it from taking over.”

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