Ann Brashares Quotes

We can never go back.

Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?

The past is a closed door.

There is no rewind button on the BETAMAX of life.

Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.

What’s broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.

In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.

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

You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

As you'll never hear the thing again, my boy, why not throw in a couple of brass bands?

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

I saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said, don't look back, you can never look back.

You name it and I've done it. I'd like to say I did it my way. But that line, I'm afraid, belongs to someone else.

Better take the keys and drive forever. Staying won't put these futures back together. All the perfect drugs and superheroes wouldn't be enough to bring me back to zero.

But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.

I regret not dancing more, just cutting loose on the dance floor. I still admire those who don't care much about what others think of them.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

Things past redress are now with me past care