Ann Brashares Quotes

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

I did not lose myself all at once.

There is no story that is you or that leads to you. Every story leads away from you.

You can't leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

Sometimes identity can be your salvation. It can be liberating to find your place in the world, but at some point, identity can hold you back.

I am alone and my spiritual journey is my experience.' This is the real experience of freedom and independence. Then we begin to see that being alone is a very beautiful thing. Nobody is obstructing our vision. We have complete panoramic vision.

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

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.

I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.

NORA: I must stand on my own two feet if I'm to get to know myself and the world outside. That's why I can't stay here with you any longer.

Sometimes when we awaken from the bad dream of disowning ourselves, we think that the sojourn to self-discovery is a new one. But it is an ancient quest.

I think it is very useful to know ourselves, but when we start naming and labeling, that is dangerous, that gets problematic. It negates that things are always changing. Besides, it's hard to pin a label onto something that's always moving.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.

He who integrates is lost.

I don't believe complete assimilation is possible, at least not for anyone who has an active, open mind. Every step, every entry into the flows of existence can be seen as a beginning, a commencement of a brand new way of seeing oneself in the world. This is the case for everyone.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.

I'm not interested in who am I. I'm interested in what's gone, the disinheritance, what I've been able to become or learn or fuse with or not fuse with. A certain freedom comes... I like it that way.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

I am much more my own man than I was when I was with the Stones.

I can't just pretend to be someone else all my life. I have to mix it up.

Gail Sheehy tells us that "the delights of self-discovery are always available." All Fools' Day is the perfect day to engrave this wisdom in our hearts.