Ann Brashares Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

4. I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

5. 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. My Name Is Memory

6. 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.

7. 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. My Name Is Memory

8. 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. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

9. 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. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

10. Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it. Sisterhood Everlasting

11. Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it. Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

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

13. some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once. Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

14. When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

15. 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 The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

16. 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.

17. Time is what keeps things from happening all at once. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

18. You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

19. You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want. Sisterhood Everlasting