Awk consider double quoted string as one token and ignore space in between

Another alternative would be to use the FPAT variable, that defines a regular expression describing the contents of each field.

Save this AWK script as parse.awk:

#!/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {
  FPAT = "([^ ]+)|(\"[^\"]+\")"
}
{
  print $2
}

Make it executable with chmod +x ./parse.awk and parse your data file as ./parse.awk data.txt:

"I am ABC"
"I am not ABC"