Sisterhood Everlasting Quotes

“He took her hand and they started walking toward the baggage claim. They didn't say anything to each other. They swung their held hands like little kids, like they believed anything could happen, like they might take off soaring into the air. All the things you wanted to happen could happen. Why not?”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“She couldn’t hide from everyone for the rest of her life… Well she could. That was the direction things were going. But she knew from long-ago experience that when you were uncertain and if you were courageous enough to let her in a real friend could do a world of good.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what precious gifts they would ever get.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“He took her in his arms right away. "I'm so sorry," he murmured in her ear. He rocked her, saying it over and over.
But no matter how many times he said it, no matter how much she knew he meant it, the words stirred around in her ear but didn't get into her brain. Sometimes he could comfort her. Sometimes he said what she needed, but today he couldn't reach her. Nothing could.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“She hadn't chosen the brave life. She'd chosen the small, fearful one.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?"
Eudoxia's expression grew more serious. "That's what you're doing anyway, my dear.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn't quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren't under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you'd have to land eventually.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“They needed to grieve alone was what Tibby's dad said. Lena wondered if really there was any choice in that. Everyone grieved alone.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want no, you don't have what you want ... Maybe you think you'll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn't work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It's by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“You get older and you learn there is one sentence, just four words long, and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this... Ready? At least I tried.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“But will he come I just want to know what you think the odds are. Tell me what you really think." "I think Tibby was a wise girl. I think she loved you.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good about yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could flip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct ad had nothing at all to give.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives, but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“It’s by living that you live more.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“This is the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. I you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“But she knew from long-ago experience that when you were uncertain and if you were courageous enough to let her in, a real friend could do a world of good.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“For the first time she saw that the nurse's name was Tabitha.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“Lena always described how she dreaded and mourned things before they even happened. Carmen was beginning to suspect that she was permitting herself to mourn this long separation only now that it was over.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“She got under the covers and put her arms around the bag. She could smell Tibby. It used to be she couldn't smell Tibby's smell in the way you couldn't smell your own; it was too familiar. But tonight she could. This was some living part of Tibby still here and she held on to it. There was more of Tibby with her here and now than in what she had seen in the cold basement room that day.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“She'd never felt about anyone the way she'd felt about him. Not even close. She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“he occupied an alternate universe that intersected nowhere with hers. He no longer represented someday, a possibility. He represented a road not taken, a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn't see where it went anymore.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting