Quotes from The Second 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, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“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, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“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, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“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, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Life isn't just fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. -William Goldman”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Some things have to be believed to be seen. -Ralph Hodgson”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Sometimes it is a relief to be invisible”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“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.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“But then she hadn’t just learned to love this summer – she had also learned how to need.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Women always seemed to bring the size they wished they were to the fitting room, rather than the size that would actually fit.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“The dreams weren’t as pleasing when they had no chance of coming true”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn’t see it.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Everything I ever said to you was true and is true.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“But there were times when you felt miserable and you wanted to feel better, and other times when you felt miserable and you figured you would just keep on feeling miserable.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“I know you are always finding ways to love me in spite of how horrible I am, I hope I haven't run out of chances.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“You Could Only See As Far As Your Headlights, But You Can Make Your Whole Trip That Way :)”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“The phone was her worst enemy and her best friend but she never knew which until she answered it.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“She wasn't as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she'd slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“Treasure in such large amounts stopped feeling precious”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“I tell myself your spirits were down the day you wrote. You're fine and we're fine. I hope it's true.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“You broke up with him," a combination Effie-Carmen voice in her head reminded her.

"But that didn't mean you were allowed to stop loving me," she felt like saying to him.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“sometimes you need to make a mess.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“She was bad at love. She loved too hard.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

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Popular quotes

“Melinda Pratt rides city bus number twelve to her cello lesson, wearing her mother's jean jacket and only one sock. Hallo, world, says Minna. Minna often addresses the world, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud. Bus number twelve is her favorite place for watching, inside and out. The bus passes cars and bicycles and people walking dogs. It passes store windows, and every so often Minna sees her face reflection, two dark eyes in a face as pale as a winter dawn. There are fourteen people on the bus today. Minna stands up to count them. She likes to count people, telephone poles, hats, umbrellas, and, lately, earrings. One girl, sitting directly in front of Minna, has seven earrings, five in one ear. She has wisps of dyed green hair that lie like forsythia buds against her neck.

There are, Minna knows, a king, a past president of the United States, and a beauty queen on the bus. Minna can tell by looking. The king yawns and scratches his ear with his little finger. Scratches, not picks. The beauty queen sleeps, her mouth open, her hair the color of tomatoes not yet ripe. The past preside of the United States reads Teen Love and Body Builder's Annual.

Next to Minna, leaning against the seat, is her cello in its zippered canvas case. Next to her cello is her younger brother, McGrew, who is humming. McGrew always hums. Sometimes he hums sentences, though most often it comes out like singing. McGrew's teachers do not enjoy McGrew answering questions in hums or song. Neither does the school principal, Mr. Ripley. McGrew spends lots of time sitting on the bench outside Mr. Ripley's office, humming.

Today McGrew is humming the newspaper. First the headlines, then the sports section, then the comics. McGrew only laughs at the headlines.

Minna smiles at her brother. He is small and stocky and compact like a suitcase. Minna loves him. McGrew always tells the truth, even when he shouldn't. He is kind. And he lends Minna money from the coffee jar he keeps beneath his mattress.

Minna looks out the bus window and thinks about her life. Her one life. She likes artichokes and blue fingernail polish and Mozart played too fast. She loves baseball, and the month of March because no one else much likes March, and every shade of brown she has ever seen. But this is only one life. Someday, she knows, she will have another life. A better one. McGrew knows this, too. McGrew is ten years old. He knows nearly everything. He knows, for instance, that his older sister, Minna Pratt, age eleven, is sitting patiently next to her cello waiting to be a woman.”
― Patricia MacLachlan, quote from The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt

“Why one human being is attracted to another is one of the great mysteries of the world.”
― Claire Cook, quote from Must Love Dogs

“I know this feeling. It's a familiar one. The feeling of knowing that everything has changed, and you have to keep going, but you don't know what to do.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin

“Isabelle's moods began to vary with alarming speed. She wondered if she had always been this way and simply failed to notice. No. Good heavens, you noticed something like this: driving to the A&P feeling collected and cozy, as though your clothes fit around you exactly right, and by the time you drove home feeling completely undone, because as you walked across the parking lot the smell of the grocery bag you held in your arms mingled with the smell of spring and produced some scrape of longing in your heart. Frankly, it was exhausting. Because for all those moments of hope that God was near, of some bursting, some widening seeming to take place in her heart, Isabelle had other moments that could only be described as rage. (117)”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Amy and Isabelle

“intense feeling is the mother of eloquence.”
― H. Rider Haggard, quote from Dawn

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