"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."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"What can I say? I'm obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can't be held responsible for our actions."
— Ann Brashares

" 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.
-Tibby Tomko-Rollins"
— Ann Brashares (Girls in Pants)

"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. "
— Ann Brashares

"Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it. "
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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."
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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"
— Ann Brashares (Girls in Pants)

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"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. "
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once."
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"Don't talk to me. I'm tired and grumpy and I'll probably make fun of you."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?"
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend."
— Ann Brashares

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.
-Tibby"
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"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."
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"Maybe, sometimes, it's easier to be mad at the people you trust because you know they'll always love you, no matter what."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own. "
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"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."
— Ann Brashares

""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." "
— Ann Brashares

"When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot. "
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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. "
— Ann Brashares

"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?"
— Ann Brashares (Girls in Pants)

"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. "
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"I love you, I'll never stop."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"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"
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"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."
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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 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."
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word."
— Ann Brashares (Girls in Pants)

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

"She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well."
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"The problem is not the problem, it's your additude toward the problem, got that?"
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"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, but

Dear 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 have

Dear 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 have

Dear 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.
"
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes."
— Ann Brashares

"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"
— Ann Brashares

"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."
— 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.
"
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"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."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter)"
— Ann Brashares (3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows)

"Lena was suspicious of many things. But she had earned her suspicions about boys. Lena knew boys. They never looked beyond your looks. They pretended to be your friend to get you to trust them, and as soon as you trusted them, they went in for the grope. They pretended to want to work on a history project or volunteer on your blood drive committee to get your attention. But as soon as they got it through their skulls that you didn't want to go out with them, they suddenly weren't interested in time lines or dire blood shortages. Worst of all, on occasion they even went out with one of your best friends to get close to you, and broke that same best friend's heart when the truth came out. Lean preferred plain guys to cute ones, but even the plain ones disappointed her."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"she wanted him to see all of her and also none of her. she wanted him to be dazzled by the bits and blinded by the whole. she wanted him to see her whole and not in pieces. she had hopes that were hard to satisfy."
— Ann Brashares (The Last Summer)