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"When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot."
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"You cannot identify an enemy without becoming one."

"Thus it is said:The path into the light seems dark,the path forward seems to go back,the direct path seems long,true power seems weak,true purity seems tarnished,true steadfastness seems changeable,true clarity seems obscure,the greatest are seems unsophisticated,the greatest love seems indifferent,the greatest wisdom seems childish.The Tao is nowhere to be found.Yet it nourishes and completes all things."

"So... wait. You're saying that on the other side-where I obviously believed in the other side-I realized that if I Returned I wouldn't believe in the other side, so I came back with the purpose of discovering faith in the other side, which I only lost because I Returned in the first place?"Llarimar paused. Then he smiled. "That last one breaks down a little bit in the face of logic, doesn't it?"

"The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them."

"The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate."

"I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices."
Explore more quotes by Ann Brashares

"Bridget's anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her."

"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."

"A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand."

"Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly."

"Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her poor, sad mother, who'd missed everything."

"She existed in her friends, there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them."

"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."

"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."

"You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right."

"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. There were plenty of things she would like to look back on but wasn't willing to risk ..."
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