Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

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.

— Ann Brashares

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.

— Ann Brashares

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, Libby 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.

— Ann Brashares

What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.

— Ann Brashares

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

— Ann Brashares

When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word.

— Ann Brashares

When she made her way to the big picture window that framed the dining room table she froze. She stopped breathing. The anger was growing again. It grew up into her throat, where she could taste it, coppery like blood, in the back of her mouth. It grew down into her stomach, where it knotted her intestines. Furthermore, it made her arms stiffen and her shoulders lock. Furthermore, it pushed against her ribs until she felt they would snap like sticks.

— Ann Brashares

When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.

— Ann Brashares