Ann Brashares Quotes

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

My mother became a believer, and then I became a believer. But when I was 43 years old, I began to think for myself, somehow, by fluke and by grace. And I thought, "Oh, my. I was so mistaken." The world isn't what I believed it to be. I am not what I believed me to be, and neither is anyone.

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,—the light which, showing the way, forbids it.

I think for anyone who's gone through a crisis, there comes a turning point, an epiphany, that marks the beginning of the end.

Something had changed in me, even if I didn't know what it was just yet. All I could think was that I felt alive for the first time.

I was having a really-early-onset midlife crisis, and then something clicked in an improv class, and I knew.

You can't just make me different, and then leave. Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was just fine with me and last words and school friends, and you can't just make me different and then die.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

When you've been initiated, you can stand in the world differently. And I think it is up to all of us, we can have cheerleaders, we can have supporters, but it comes down to us as individuals, how do we now proceed? Do we have the tools to proceed?

A teacher cannot give you the truth The truth is already in you You only need to open yourself – body, mind and heart- so that his or her teachings will penetrate your own seeds of understanding and enlightenment If you let the words enter you, the soil and the seeds will do the rest of the work

I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.

I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else's control. I feel that what I'm thinking and saying is now for myself. Before it was for and by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind, sir!

I have come not to teach but to awaken.

I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good. And the PCT would make me that way. There, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world...all the beauty of it, and the sadness too. The hunger and the thirst. Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified into one person who by chance, or fate--call it what you will--happened to be me.

That's what does it-- that moment where you think you're lost, and then discover that you're not, that you've never really left. There's something that happens in that incredible tiny no-time, and that something is like the revelation of learning.

It's amazing in the blink of an eye you finally see the light.

Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

I was an economist now turning into a human being - as if these are two different things. I don't know but I did that and then I had no vision.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

How can one become enlightened in one single moment? One can, because one is enlightened -- one just has to recognize the fact. It is not something that happens from the outside, it is something that arises from the inside. It has always been there but you were clouded, you were full of thoughts.

Someone once told me that the finer points of devotion are about the size of a pinhole, and there are millions of them. And if you could connect each dot, then you’ve got a diagram of what you think you thought you knew, and if you’re willing to admit that you know nothing…you have the blueprint for a breakthrough.