Ann Brashares Quotes

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Whenever we feel shame, it's a mark of some deep investment or deep internal struggle.

I'm a grown woman. I can come up with plenty of things that I've done and said or didn't say or failed to do that remain with me as sources of embarrassment.

Like most people, what I find irritating in others are my own faults.

I act the way I act and I'm not proud of it.

I don't want to sound self-righteous, and I don't want to act like I have it all put together.

Subconsciously - I didn't know it then, I realize it today when I know a little bit more about the mind and the brain - I fought like I didn't deserve to live.

I believe the arts are the best way to help people go on a journey of self-discovery toward their own compassion and empathy for humanity and themselves.

A struggle in my life is to feel like I'm a good person and to feel like I'm a nice person. I try to be and anytime I fall short of that it feels really bad.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime.

Only those faults which we encounter in ourselves are insufferable to us in others.

I have done bad things. I can't take them back, and they are part of who I am. Most of the time, they seem like the only thing I am.

I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it.

Sometimes you're not like the person you'd want to hang out with. Would I really want to hang out with me full time? No, you've gotta find people who balance you out.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

My sense of insecurity keeps me alert, always ready to correct my errors.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.

I don't have the delusion that I'm the best or have the right answer. Whenever someone is out there pissed at you or me, they don't even know you or I. What they are really pissed at is themselves. You might have total respect for them but they don't respect themselves.

We are here to love, not to judge. I'd been blaming and raging. I certainly wasn't loving my daughter that afternoon as God loves me. God's love doesn't insist on perfection or even good common sense. Why then should I demand more of those I love? With this tiny change in perspective I began to see the need for correction wasn't in my daughter, but in me.

Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.

If you read something bad about yourself and it stings you, I've learned that somewhere that's a judgment I'm holding about myself, so I'll try to work through that.

Never let us be discouraged with ourselves. It is not when we are conscious of our faults that we are the most wicked; on the contrary, we are less so. We see by a brighter light; and let us remember for our consolation, that we never perceive our sins till we begin to cure them.