Book detail: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This complete collection includes all four novels in Ann Brashares' beloved series, following the lives of Carmen, Lena, Tibby, and Bridget as they navigate the complexities of friendship, love, and self-discovery through their shared experiences with the enchanted pants.
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“What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn’t have it. Why did she always feel she had to do something in the face of beauty?”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“I love you, I'll never stop.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love one another. We're nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“The rules took a while to sort out. Lena and Carmen wanted to focus on friendship-type rules, stuff about keeping in touch with one another over the summer, and making sure the Pants kept moving from one girl to the next. Tibby preferred to focus on random things you could and couldn't do in the Pants --- like picking your nose.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“There are some people who fall in love over and over.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Tibby's wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Carmen sat up when she heard a familiar trill from her computer. It was an instant message from Bee. Beezy3: Packing. Do you have my purple sock with the heart on the ankle? Carmabelle: No. Like I'd wear your socks. Carmen looked from her computer screen down to her feet. To her dismay, her socks were two faintly different shades of purple. She rotated her foot to get a view of her anklebone. Carmabelle: Ahem. Might possibly have sock.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Women always seemed to bring the size they wished they were to the fitting room, rather than the size that would actually fit.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She wasn't as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she'd slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“I mean putting yourself out there in the way of overwhelming happiness and knowing you're also putting yourself in the way of terrible harm. I'm scared to be this happy. I'm scared to be this extreme.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Everything I ever said to you was true and is true.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“I like that you let yourself be surprised”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Shy” was the sympathetic interpretation she got from older people. “Snotty” was the interpretation she got from people her own age.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big. As big as she could. She promised Bailey she would keep playing.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“The dreams weren’t as pleasing when they had no chance of coming true”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn’t see it.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“But then she hadn’t just learned to love this summer – she had also learned how to need.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“The phone was her worst enemy and her best friend but she never knew which until she answered it.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She wanted him to notice her so much.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“But there were times when you felt miserable and you wanted to feel better, and other times when you felt miserable and you figured you would just keep on feeling miserable.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“When there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“For some reason our lives were marked by summers. . . . Summer was the time when our lives joined completely, when we all had our birthdays, when really important things happened”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn’t matter if you friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection