Quotes from Ann Brashares

She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.

It's always nervewracking to put yourself out there. But it's the root of joy.

What was it about Eric? He was handsome and talented, yeah. But lots of guys were. She had adored Billy Klein back in Alabama the summer before, and she had even felt attracted to him, but it wasn't like this. What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.

But then she hadn't just learned to love this summer – she had also learned how to need.

All I could think to do was love her. That's all a person can do.

He didn't seem to realize that three excuses was as good as no excuse.

He could lose himself in her forever, he thought.

It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.

Women always seemed to bring the size they wished they were to the fitting room, rather than the size that would actually fit.

I told him that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first.

I'm sorry you asked me out, otherwise maybe I could have liked you.

I like that you let yourself be surprised

We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.

The dreams weren't as pleasing when they had no chance of coming true

Don't open, don't climb, don't reach, and you will not fall. 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.

This body is breaking down, but I am not.

Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.

She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.

How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn't forget?

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

It wasn't just that Lucy wanted to help him. She wasn't as selfless as that. She was madly attracted to him. She was attracted to all of the normal things and the weird things, too, like the back of his neck and his thumbs on the edge of his desk and the way his hair stuck out on one side like a little wing over his ear. She caught his smell once, and it made her dizzy. She couldn't fall asleep that night.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what precious gifts they would ever get.

All my life, everybody has seen me a certain way. What do you see?