"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)

"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)

"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

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

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

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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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."
— Ann Brashares

"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

"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."
— Jane Austen

"Never do anything yourself that others can do for you."
— Agatha Christie