Ann Brashares

“Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms.”

“She didn't open the envelope until she'd gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadn't given her the thousand dollars she'd asked for-he'd given her ten thousand.”

“She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.”

“They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she.”

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

“He loved her for being so beautiful, and he hated her for it. He loved how she put shiny stuff on her lips for him, and he also reviled her for it. He wanted her to walk home alone, and he wanted to run after her and grab her up before she could take another step.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

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

“Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go. Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day. maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.”

“But it was smell that carried memory.”

“Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.”

“Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives, but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.”

“Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you`ll keep faith in me, you`ll remember who we are, and you`ll never feel despair.”

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

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