Ann Brashares

“The weather turned. Her skin seemed to grow a million extra pores, and all of them opened to take in the warmth and tenderness of the air. The sun on her face made her want to cry. Into all those millions of open pores came the sunshine, and other feelings as well. In and out. She was porous.”

“The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched.”

“People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight—at least as the normally experienced them.”

“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.”

“Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.”

“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.”

“All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.”

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

“Why does he have to be my boyfriend? Are you inferior if you don't have a boyfriend? Why does everybody have to be in love with somebody?”

“I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.”

“They were more like the grown-up dog whose family loved it but had to move to an apartment in Korea (is it Korea?) where people sometimes eat dogs.”

“Tibby was shaking her head."What?" Bailey asked."Nothing. Just that you suprise me every day," Tibby said.Bailey smiled at her. "I like that you let yourself be suprised.”

“Wear them, they will make you brave.”

“Live, laugh, love.When you can feel someone else's pain and joy as if it's your own, thats when you know you really love them - Tina Lowell”

“Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. "I'm scared... ," she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.”

“There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.”

“Don't talk to me. I'm tired and grumpy and I'll probably make fun of you.”

“She glared at him, feeling the old frustration. Sometimes in his presence she felt the deepest connection to him, and other times she felt completely alone-as though any bond to him was her own bitter imagination.”

“Looking back, it was the thing in his life that shamed him the most: the times he was purposefully, calculatingly mean to Alice. It was those moments, and there had been many of them, that indicated to him that he was not a good person. He got mad at her for many things, but it was always really for the same thing: that she possessed his love and he couldn't seem to get it back.She didn't deserve it, which was to say she deserved better”

“Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things.”

“Ruins stood for what was lost, and yet there were beautiful-peaceful, historic, intellectual. Not tragic or regrettable. Lena tried to keep hers that way too, and she succeeded to some extent. Why not celebrate what you had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There could be joy in things that ended. ”

“So often this summer I keep thinking: I know I'm holding back. I know I'm waiting. I know I'm afraid to go forward. But I don't know how to get there from here."He was quiet, so she kept going. "Sometimes I see it as a tricky mountain pass between 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 I won't be able to get back. I'll turn around and the clouds will have settled over the mountaintop. Or the waters will have risen and shifted, and there will be no way home."Paul nodded. He took her hand again, which she discovered she appreciated.But that's not even the real fear."He gave her an odd smile. Short on mirth but affectionate. "What's the real fear?"The real fear is that I won't want to go home.”

“She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were. ”

“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. ”

“Your problem isn't the problem, it's your attitude about the problem.”

“She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?”

“Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.”

“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.”

“What can I say? I'm obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can't be held responsible for our actions.”