Ann Brashares Quotes

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

I'm known for being quite gobby, but also, I'm quite old fashioned in the sense that I like writing letters.

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

To get something you must give something away. To hold something you must give something away. To love something you must give something away.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

A letter is the most imperishable thing on earth.

And it's okay if you have to go away Oh just remember the telephone works both ways And if I never ever hear them ring If nothing else I'll think the bells inside Have finally found you someone else and that's okay Cause I'll remember everything you sang ((You and I both))

I was a pen pal with one guy, a long time ago. I think we only wrote to each other twice. We didn't really keep it up that long. But, I love it. I think it's really sweet and very creative and freeing, when you get to put a pen to paper, 'cause you don't really do it that much these days, with all this technology.

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call.

The past is always with us, for nothing that once was time can ever depart.

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out discretion, and so disappears the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

The letter we all love to receive is one that carries so much of the writer’s personality that she seems to be sitting beside us, looking at us directly and talking just as she really would, could she have come on a magic carpet, instead of sending her proxy in ink-made characters on mere paper.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

When you surrender and stop resisting and stop trying to change that which you can't change, but be in the moment, be fully open to the blessings you've already received and those that are yet to come and stand in that space of gratitude ... and look at where you are and how far you've come and what you've accomplished - when you can claim THAT and SEE that, the literal vibration of your life will change.