Ann Brashares

Carmen: __ want you to leave me alone, but not ignore me. I want you to miss me when I go away to college, but not be sad. I want you to stay exactly the same, but not be lonely or alone. I want to do the leaving, and not have you ever leave me.

Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed.

I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms.

What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.

Tibby, on the other hand, had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with Brian striving for the comfort of not knowing.

Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.

They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she.

Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives, but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.

He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.

They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age.

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

Maybe you think you__l be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn__ work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It__ 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.

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.

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.

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.

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.