Ann Brashares

“It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him contentedly munching on his Rice Krispies, waiting for the right juncture for launchtime.He looked up at her briefly and smiled, and she realized something important. This was how they both liked it. Though most people felt bonded by conversation, Lena and Bapi were two of a kind who didn’t. They bonded by the routine of just eating cereal together.She promptly forgot her script and went back to her cereal.At one point, when she was down to just milk, Bapi reached over and put his hand on hers. ‘You’re my girl,’ he said.And Lena knew she was.”

“Dad,Please accept this money to fix the broken window. I’m sure it’s already fixed, considering Lydia’s house pride and her phobia about unconditioned air, butDear Al,I can’t begin to explain my actions at Lydia’s – I mean yours and Lydia’s house. When I get to Charleston, I never imagined that you would haveDear Dad and Lydia,I apologize to both of you for my irrational behavior. I know it’s all my fault, but if you would have listened to ONE THING I had to say, I might not haveDear Dad’s new family,I hope you’ll all be very happy being blond together. May people speak only in inside voices for the rest of your lives.P.S. Lydia, you wedding dress makes your arms look fat.”

“Barbara appraised her with critical eyes. ‘Oh my. Well, this is going to need some work.’ She went right to Carmen’s hips and pulled the unfinished seams open. ‘Yes, we’ll have to take this way out. I’m not sure I have enough fabric. I’ll check when I get back to my office.’You are a horrible witch, Carmen thought.She knew she looked absolutely awful in the dress. She was part Bourbon Street whore and part Latina first-communion spectacle.”

“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?”

“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.”

“It’s more that I’m afraid of time. And not having enough of it. Time to figure out who I’m supposed to be… to find my place in the world before I have to leave it. I’m afraid of what I’ll miss.”

“Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you'll never run out.”

“Tibby, you are crazy," Carmen said. "Those pants are in love with you. They want you for your body and your mind." She couldn't help seeing the pants in a completely new way.”

“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.”

“Carmen sat up when she heard a familiar trill from her computer. It was an instant message from Bee.Beezy3: Packing. Do you have my purple sock with the heart on the ankle?Carmabelle: No. Like I'd wear your socks.Carmen looked from her computer screen down to her feet. To her dismay, her socks were two faintly different shades of purple. She rotated her foot to get a view of her anklebone.Carmabelle: Ahem. Might possibly have sock.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“She was astonished, and at the same time she knew. There were many things in life like that. You couldn’t imagine it, and then it happened and you couldn’t really imagine it hadn’t.”

“You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things”

“It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didn’t come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you weren’t ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal. ”

“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.”

“She wasn’t sure if he wanted more from her or if he wanted less. Maybe it was both. Maybe it was always both.”

“There was a moment in between, a moment flung free in the midst of the transition, when he made contact. That was the moment she would dwell on.”

“Alice suspected Paul couldn’t really picture his father, just like she couldn’t picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.”

“Sometimes you couldn’t face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.”

“There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him.”

“I knew her hair and her coloring and her shapes would be different next time, but the way she wore her body would keep on.”

“What if people knew they were recycled? Would that change anything?”

“I think the true ascent of man, the moment when humans divided irrevobably from apes and other fellow creatures, occurred with the birth of the first distinct soul. And much happiness ensued.”

“It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans.”

“There was one thing Bridget like about guys. They took insults well.”

“Rule #1: The customer is always right. Rule #2: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule #1. -Duncan Howe”

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

“How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.”

“you remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you.”

“I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.'After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.”

“And I thought about the color and I realized what blue it was. It was the soft and changeable, essential blue of a well-worn pair of pants.Pants = Love”

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

“I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.”

“I'm afraid of time... I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies.”

“If you ever meet a guy and you fall in love with him, but because of some weird genetic mutation he doesn't seem to return the feeling?... Wear that dress.”

“Sometimes you need to make a mess.-Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeper”

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

“Wish for what you want, work for what you need.-Carmen's grandmother”

“You'll turn out ordinary if you're not careful.”

“She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own. ”

“Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.”

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

“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. ”

“some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.”

“We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If we think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.”

“Carmen hated the 'life is too short" rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because "life is too short not to," you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.”

“You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.”