Ann Brashares Quotes

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

You cannot go around and keep score. If you keep score on the good things and the bad things, you'll find out that you're a very miserable person. God gave man the ability to forget, which is one of the greatest attributes you have. Because if you remember everything that's happened to you, you generally remember that which is the most unfortunate.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

A good forgettery is a happier possession than a good memory.

The real enemy of happiness is the mind's fixations and delusions... If you have the right mind, you can overcome anything - you can be happy, no matter what.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

It's good to have a short memory because it keeps life fresh.

The only failure is not knowing how to be happy."---My Story

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one's youth.

Making comparisons can spoil your happiness.

The things we remember best are those better forgotten.

I, I don't think anybody's continually happy, uh, except idiots, you know. You know, you have to have little moments of depression.

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

I'm like a goldfish. My memory is terrible.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

Continents of memory had been lost.

Happiness does not depend on your circumstances; it depends on your will. It's a choice that you make.

We do not need to become unhappy just because things don't go our way.

What's the point of being sad?" he says. "We're here now.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

I can't be happy every day but I can be cheerful.

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

Maybe if I forgot things once in a while, we'd all be a little bit happier.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.