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

— Ann Brashares

His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.

— Ann Brashares

Honesty was a tough customer... Once you started allowing yourself some honesty, it couldn't easily be contained or limited to one part of your life. It was like poison ivy or a bossy houseguest. Once it was there, you couldn't tell it what to do. You had to really fight to keep it from taking over.

— Ann Brashares

How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?

— Ann Brashares

How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.

— Ann Brashares

How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?" Eudoxia's expression grew more serious. "That's what you're doing anyway, my dear.

— Ann Brashares

I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.

— Ann Brashares

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

— Ann Brashares

I don't have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I've been able to connect with a lot of people.

— Ann Brashares

I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can't make yourself love someone, can you?

— Ann Brashares