Ann Brashares Quotes

“The Pants were the only witness to all our lives. They were the witness and the document too.”

“They gave her courage. The Pants mysteriously held the attributes of her three best friends, and luckily bravery was one of them. She would give the Pants what meager gifts she had, but courage was the thing she would take.”

“Sometimes it seems like we’re so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones.”

″...there were a million little lines of shading that we couldn’t convey so easily. They were the subtle things, and understanding them, even knowing when you missed them, was what separated other friends from real friends, like we were.”

“It wasn’t just that she missed her friends; she was starting to wonder if she needed them around to feel like she existed at all.”

“Tonight was different. I felt like we were each separate and full to our edges with our own stories, mostly unshared. In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone.”

“Can you make yourself love? Can you make yourself be loved?”

“Carmen finally let out her breath. ‘These are magic pants.‘”

“Love your pals. Love yourself.”

“Maybe happiness didn’t have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures.”

“She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who’d lost nothing, was not.”

“The sunset was too beautiful. It almost made Lena feel panicked because she couldn’t save it.”

“She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big.”

“Somewhere in her brain a wall formed, a wall that kept out further consideration about what was happening here.”

“They just witnessed one of those regular but painful life transitions. That, it turns out, is The Way of the Pants.”

“Tonight we give the Pants the love of our Sisterhood so we can take that love wherever we go.”

“The Pants had absorbed the summer. Maybe it was better that they couldn’t talk. They would let us remember more how we had felt, and less what had actually happened.”

“Still the Pants promised us there was time. Nothing would be lost. There was all year if we needed it. We had all the way until next summer, when we would take out the Traveling Pants and, together or apart, begin again.”

″‘Go away’, she said to the guilt... Guilt wanted her most when she least wanted it.”

“The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance.”