“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“You get older and you learn there is one sentence just four worlds long and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this… Ready ”
“Ready.”
“At least I tried.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“You just have to let people love you in the way they can”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“I'm writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don't think I can say it. I'm not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I'm doing it to thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give." (Lena, 194)”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“But I know this. We're ready to move forward again in our way. Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. There were plenty of things she would like to look back on but wasn't willing to risk ...”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same." (Lena, 211)”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“She had to have faith not just in trying but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail Was she strong enough not to”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“It’s natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily most gracefully. So here’s me asking you to please not make that mistake.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“He no longer represented someday a possibility. He represented a road not taken a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn’t see it anymore.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“Hey," he said. "It's someday." He said the last word in Greek.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“It was probably good you couldn't flip the love switch because sometimes it was what you needed even if you didn't want it.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“The present no matter what I brought couldn’t change the past. The Past was set and sealed.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“Bridget's anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself. ... As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
“She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Sisterhood Everlasting
Ann Brashares
Born place: in Virginia, The United States
Born date July 30, 1967
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“Pervitin became a symptom of the developing performance society. Boxed chocolates spiked with methamphetamine were even put on the market. A good 14 milligrams of methamphetamine was included in each individual portion—almost five times the amount in a Pervitin pill. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight” was the slogan of this potent confectionery. The recommendation was to eat between three and nine of these, with the indication that they were, unlike caffeine, perfectly safe.”
― quote from Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany
“There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Poems of Fernando Pessoa
“We were in the autumnlands.
Dim as it was, the forest glowed. The golden leaves flashing by blazed like sparks caught in the updraft of a fire. A scarlet carpet unrolled before us, rich and flawless as velvet. Rising from the forest floor, the black, tangled roots breathed a bluish mist that reduced the farthest trees' trunks to ghostly silhouettes, yet left their foliage's luminous hues untouched. Vivid moss speckled the branches like tarnished copper. The crisp spice of pine sap infused the cool air over a musty perfume of dry leaves. A knot swelled in my throat. I couldn't look away. There was too much of it, too fast. I'd never be able to drink it all in...”
― Margaret Rogerson, quote from An Enchantment of Ravens
“The industrialists, with their machines and factories and clock-time, began the onslaught against anyone who was content to take it easy.”
― James Wallman, quote from Stuffocation: Living More with Less
“But if she has to try too hard, perhaps its the universe's way of telling her this isn't to be. She doesn't believe in God, but she believes in a natural order, a higher directive, to be gleaned and mulled and acted upon.”
― Mira T. Lee, quote from Everything Here Is Beautiful
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The Wedding
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