Rebecca Stead Quotes

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

There are people you remember and people you dream of.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

Make me remember you like you remember me.

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.

I have a thousand images of you in an hour; all different and all coming back to the same. I think of you once against a sky line: and on the hill that Sunday morning. The light and the shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice - you.

But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.