Ann Brashares quotes:

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

As much as I'm drawn to writing about teenage girls, I like the idea of having the freedom to branch out and write about different ages, for different ages.

It's so much easier to have no expectations than to have big ones.

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

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

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.

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

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

You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.

I agree that a love of reading is a great gift for a parent to pass on to his or her child.

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.

Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter)

One must have a good memory to keep the promises one has made.

A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.

Maybe, sometimes, it's easier to be mad at the people you trust because you know they'll always love you, no matter what.

A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.

Something about giving in without a fight felt wrong.

Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.

Please believe him. Keep your heart open to him. He can make you happy. He has always loved you, and you once loved him with all your heart.

she never showed girly weaknesses like cellulite or crushes. she never lingered on injustices committed against her.

I don't have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I've been able to connect with a lot of people.

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

The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.

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 love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way.

Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.

She had never had a boy talk to her like that. There was no cover of bullshit, no flirtation, no added charm, but his look was searing. He was different from anyone she had known.

The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it.

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.

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.

When your about to criticize someone walk a mile in thier shoes, that way when you criticize them you're a mile away from them and you have their shoes

The path of your life can change in an instant.

She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time

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

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.

Love is like war; easy to begin, hard to end.

Daniel?" "Yes." "Did you ever think we were meant not to be together?" "No. We are meant to be together. We are just meant to want it very badly.

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.

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.

Honesty was a tough customer... Once you started allowing yourself some honesty, it couldn't easily be contained or limited to one part of your life. It was like poison ivy or a bossy houseguest. Once it was there, you couldn't tell it what to do. You had to really fight to keep it from taking over.

A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting.

The rules took a while to sort out. Lena and Carmen wanted to focus on friendship-type rules, stuff about keeping in touch with one another over the summer, and making sure the Pants kept moving from one girl to the next. Tibby preferred to focus on random things you could and couldn't do in the Pants --- like picking your nose.

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.

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

...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.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.

she looked up at the stars and gave Tibby thanks. She didn't have to throw her thoughts far to know they reached her.

Lena felt like a child. Worse than a child and less valuable. She felt like a mouse. No, smaller than a mouse and less alive. Her life seemed so small and crumpled you could shoot it through a straw like a spitball.

She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn't. You didn't know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn't know how strong you were.

Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed.

Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down there on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him.

How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?"Eudoxia's expression grew more serious. "That's what you're doing anyway, my dear.

She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.

Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.

Not all who wander are lost

No matter how far back you cut a willow tree, it will never really die.

But will he come I just want to know what you think the odds are. Tell me what you really think." "I think Tibby was a wise girl. I think she loved you.

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

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

Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.

There was love expressed in the places you usually forget to look.

She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big. As big as she could. She promised Bailey she would keep playing.

But certain souls cohere. It's rare but possible. But it takes two powerful wills to make it so.

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.

It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didnâ??t come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you werenâ??t ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal.

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

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

Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny

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.

But it was smell that carried memory.

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

Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth.

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

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

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.

I'm not going anywhere without you. We're swimming to China together. And if the worst happens, I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.

Blood may be thicker than water, but friendship is thicker than both.

Tibby's wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.

Forget Jack, I'm in love with the cold, dirt floor.

Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but it never made any progress. Later she remembered thinking that a normal person might have begun by saying that he was like the beach.

I killed her once and died for her many times and I still have nothing to show for it. I always search for her ; I always remember her. I carry the hope that someday she will remember me.

You are not going to die, I know I said I'd let you, but I can't.

It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

How many times could you give up on someone you loved?

It was wrong. But it was worth it.

I told him, though, 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. (Riley to her sister Alice about Paul)

What Daniel taketh away, Daniel giveth.

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.

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.

Some things have to be believed to be seen. -Ralph Hodgson

It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.

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

The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.

I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.

She wasn't as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she'd slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts.

Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.

She got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted.

I mean putting yourself out there in the way of overwhelming happiness and knowing you're also putting yourself in the way of terrible harm. I'm scared to be this happy. I'm scared to be this extreme.

Everything I ever said to you was true and is true.

Marnie hated to see her spend so much of herself on someone who didn't care.