Ann Brashares Quotes

It's the most annoying question and they just can't help asking you. You'll be asked it at family gatherings, weddings, and on first dates. And you'll ask yourself far too often. It's the question that has no good answer. It's the question that when people stop asking it, you'll feel even worse. - WHY ARE YOU SINGLE?

I complained to my mother about wanting to look less like myself and more like my friends. My mother then gave me a lesson in embracing my differences and loving them despite what others said.

I think the whole nerves thing comes into play when we worry about what other people and society will think.

I think that it is mad that everything always has to have a label - whether it be the clothes by designers, or whether you are in a relationship or not. Everybody always wants to have that label when it is not always necessary.

I think, very often, little girls look at these teen television shows and think, 'I have to have a boyfriend because Blair Waldorf has a boyfriend, and she's always fighting over boys!'

I went to a school where the girls that were found attractive were the complete opposite to me. I judged my worth on how many boyfriends everyone had, and I wanted to jump out of my skin every second of every day.

It's silly when girls sell their souls because it's in.

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

I don't want to be defined as someone's girlfriend.

I have friends say, "Don't you want to have a little you?" The jury's still out on that for me. I don't have a definitive answer, but I do know that I can look back on some of the things I've worked on and some of the things that have literally come out of my imagination and be just as proud of it as if I had created a person. I feel like that shouldn't be of any less value. It can't be because it's what my life is, and I don't want to make it smaller or more palatable just because society tells you to. If you can get comfortable with sacrifice, then you are having it all.

People are really concerned about my relationship status. When I tell people I'm happy being single, they don't believe me. They say: 'You have to be miserable being alone'.

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!

I have never been able to understand the compelling phrase, 'keeping up with the Joneses.' It does not matter very much whether I keep up with Tom Jones or anybody else; what is important is to keep up with myself by making my today a little better than my yesterday.

Craig said the problem with things is that everyone is always comparing everyone with everyone

Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.

I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young woman's statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that, like the women of China with their tiny broken feet, she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she cannot handle. Anorexic women signal with their bodies "I will take up only a small amount of space. I won't get in the way." They signal "I won't be intimidating or threatening." (Who is afraid of a seventy-pound adult?)

People living their lives for you on TV; They say they're better than you, and you agree.

Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?

Does a little fish, swimming though the net's eye, suffer from inferiority complex?

A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.

To be like other people is to be unlike ourselves.

There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love.

People want you to be ordinary.

Who are they to give stars or dots? They're Wemmicks just like you." Eli to Punchinello (p. 25)