Ann Brashares

“Why do we fight the things we fight when giving into them isn't so bad at all?”

“She sat on the dock at the lake and watched the clouds thicken. She wished it would rain hard and long and clear everything away. Rain never came when you asked for it.”

“We will go. Nowhere we know. We don't have to talk at all.”

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

“I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can't make yourself love someone, can you?”

“Når man har et prosjekt, er det mye enklere å late som om man er en annen. Man kunne late som om man var Nancy Drew, for eksempel, eller Maria i Sound of Music, eller den forstandige og rappkjefta husholdersken i The Brady Bunch.”

“I felt as though thepast and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going.If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That’s all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we needthose stories. I guess I do.”

“Why not celebrate what you had had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? Therecould be joy in things that ended.”

“I confess I've relived it so many times, I hardly remember it anymore. My feelings are strong enough to refract and distort the truth of that journey. But then... my feelings are the truth of that journey”

“Part of the danger of living so long, knowing you were going to come back and back again, was putting off your life until you never lived it at all. Just so it was possible. Just so long as you could, you never actually did. Just so you didn't ruin it.”

“Nobody bothered with him. His failures were private and invisible”

“People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it.”

“The path of your life can change in an instant.”

“Sometimes when she thought of Eric, and now more powerfully when she saw him, she felt some achy nostalgia for her old self. For the dauntless, daring soul she used to be. There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone.”

“What is it we recognize? The soul is a mysterious thing. It's no less mysterious for me, though I've seen my own and others' refracted through hundreds of bodies over time.”

“Sometimes I see it as a tricky mountain pass beween two valleys. Other times, it's like perilous straits connecting two lands. Partly it's the fear of the trip itself, I think, but partly it's the fear that won't be able to get back. I'll turn around and the cloud will have settled over the mountaintop. Or the waters will have risen and shifted, and there will be no way home.”

“Could she kiss him? Would he allow her that? Was that something he could pretend was nothing? What about making love? Could she just open up her legs and pull him inside her and have him all she wanted and later give her assent that it was nothing?”

“Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile”

“The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford.”

“Lena remembered herself in all the old familiar things they said. 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.”

“As it was a small town and a bored town and a hopeful town, kids talked and rumors started.”

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

“How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?”

“Usually by this time in the summer, we were as worn in to one another as pebbles in a riverbed. For three months we’d had complete togetherness and not much outside stimuli. What few stories we had, we’d considered, analyzed, celebrated, cursed, and joked into sand.Tonight was different. I felt like we were each separate and full to our edges with our own stories, mostly unshared. In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt real. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.”

“Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes.”

“She and Effie were already putting on their turtle-and-hare show. Everyone paid lots of attention to Lena at first, because she was striking to look at, but within a few hours or days, they always fully committed their attentions to exuberant, affectionate Effie. Lena felt Effie deserved it. 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.”

“When she made her way to the big picture window that framed the dining room table she froze. She stopped breathing. The anger was growing again.It grew up into her throat, where she could taste it, coppery like blood, in the back of her mouth. It grew down into her stomach, where it knotted her intestines. It made her arms stiffen and her shoulders lock. It pushed against her ribs until she felt they would snap like sticks.”

“I know you are always finding ways to love me in spite of how horrible I am, I hope I haven't run out of chances.”

“I wanted to come more than halfway.”

“Not everyone got a close family. Not everyone needed one.”

“It’s by living that you live more.”

“There was something about a wedding. No matter how much you put into it, you could always put in more. There was always someone else you could call, some other question you could ask, something else you could buy. You could put every worry, every desire, every whim, every moment of your waking day into a wedding, and it was big enough to absorb them all.”

“She'd put the envelope Tibby had left for her unopened in her underwear drawer. At first it was so she would see it there, and then she tried to cover it so she wouldn't see it there, but it turned out her underwear was too flimsy to cover anything.”

“You broke up with him," a combination Effie-Carmen voice in her head reminded her."But that didn't mean you were allowed to stop loving me," she felt like saying to him.”

“But there were times when you felt miserable and you wanted to feel better, and other times when you felt miserable and you figured you would just keep on feeling miserable.”

“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.”

“Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still.”

“Lena, listen to me, okay? We don't have much more time here. You are in love. I've never seen anything like this before. You have to be brave, okay? You have to go and tell Kostos how you feel. I swear to God if you don't, you will regret it for the rest of your cowardly life.''What if he doesn't like me back?''That's what I mean about being brave.”

“She wanted him to notice her so much.”

“...he had found the courage once in his life to seize a chance at love from a person who knew how to give it. Lena prayed on these two moons that she would find that same courage.”

“Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldn't spend on their own absent children and grandchildren.”

“Like why Lena always thought of Ritz crackers when she shaved her legs. Who knew why? And did it even matter?”

“Each of these moments was a pearl on a string, one prettier and more perfect than the next.”

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

“The most haunting thing was not that he didn't love her anymore. She could have accepted that eventually. The most haunting thing was that he did. He loved her from afar. He loved her in a way that was preserved in time, that couldn't be sullied. And she tended it in her careful, curatorial way.”

“My memory is good for some things and not others.”

“But it was smell that carried memory.”

“Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.”

“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.”

“I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.”