Ann Brashares (born July 30, 1967) is an American writer of young adult fiction. She is best known as the author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.
The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.
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.
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
All my life, everybody has seen me a certain way. What do you see?
It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans.
There was a moment in between, a moment flung free in the midst of the transition, when he made contact. That was the moment she would dwell on.
There are going to be moments of deep, deep doubts, and you have to have faith that your initial idea was good and just muddle through.
I look back on my 20s. It's supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you're making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.
So far, she’d been her usual lame self: solitary and routine-loving, carefully avoiding any path that might lead to spontaneous human interaction. Lena Kaligaris
Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.
It was wrong. But it was worth it.
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
Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.
Life isn't just fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. -William Goldman
You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.
You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.
Carmen hated the 'life is too short" rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because "life is too short not to," you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.
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.
There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn't quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren't under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you'd have to land eventually.
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)