Ann Brashares

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.

Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.

Healing wasn__ always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that.

This is the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. I you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want.

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.

Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. Then you didn__ want it anymore. You took what you had for granted until it was no longer yours. This, it seemed to her, was one of the crueller paradoxes of human nature.

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.

She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own.

He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn__ work anymore. In fact, they__ never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world__ more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.

she looked up at the stars and gave Tibby thanks. She didn't have to throw her thoughts far to know they reached her.

My memory is good for some things and not others.

When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting.

We're the Septembers now. The real ones. We are everything to one another. We don't need to say so; it's just true. Sometimes it seems like we're so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones. We settle into types- Bridget the athlete, Lena the beauty, Tibby the rebel, and me, Carmen, the...what? The one with the bad temper. But the one who cares the most. The one who cares that we stick together.

[Carmen] knew a worse friend would have made her feel better.

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

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.

We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real.