Rebecca Stead Quotes

“Well, it's simple to love someone," she said. "But it's hard to know when you need to say it out loud.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there's a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Trying to forget really doesn't work. In fact, it's pretty much the same as remembering. But I tried to forget anyway, and to ignore the fact that I was remembering you all the time.”

— Rebecca Stead

“If I'm afraid of someone on the street, I'll turn to him (it's always a boy) and say, "Excuse me, do you happen to know what time it is?" This is my way of saying to the person, "I see you as a friend, and there is no need to hurt me or take my stuff. Also, I don't even have a watch and I am probably not worth mugging." So far, it's worked like gangbusters ... And I've discovered that most people I'm afraid of are actually very friendly.”

— Rebecca Stead

Boredom is what happens to people who have no control over their minds.

— Rebecca Stead

Nice tights, I snorted. Or I tried to snort, anyway. I'm not exactly sure how, though people in books are always doing it.

— Rebecca Stead

I'm an old man, and she's gone now. So don't worry, okay?

— Rebecca Stead

“Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It's how we're used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Life is where you sleep and what you see when you wake up in the morning, and who you tell about your weird dream, and what you eat for breakfast and who you eat it with. Life isn't something that happens to you. It's something you make yourself, all the time.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Love is when you like someone so much that you can't just call it "like," so you have to call it "love.”

— Rebecca Stead

“If you took every tear cried by everyone on earth on one single day and put them in a container, how big would that container need to be? Could you fill a water tower? Three water towers? It's one of those unknowable things. There has to be an answer, but we'll never know what it is.”

— Rebecca Stead

“She's called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school.”

— Rebecca Stead

“But every person has to learn to accept what has happened in the past. Without bitterness. Or there is no point in continuing with life.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Blue Team! It's what's for breakfast!”

— Rebecca Stead

“Life was a too-tall stack of books that had started to lean to one side, and each new day was another book on top.”

— Rebecca Stead

“I think that when you don't know, you should just wait until you do.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.”

— Rebecca Stead

And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love.

— Rebecca Stead

“Look, I know Mom talks about the big picture. She wants you to remember that you'll find new friends, that life is always changing, sometimes in really good ways. But life is also what's happening NOW, Georges. What Dallas and Carter are doing is happening NOW, and you can't just wait for it to be over. We have to do something about it. Now.”

— Rebecca Stead

“There was no black line separating Colorado from Utah. There was no black line between friendship and whatever might come next.”

— Rebecca Stead

We have lunch at ten-forty-five, Colin said. A stupidly early lunch. At our school, the older you get, the stupider your lunch period.

— Rebecca Stead

“People act like riddles are hard, but real life is harder. In real life, there are always more than two doors -Sherm”

— Rebecca Stead

“It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

— Rebecca Stead

“This is the world of pretend. We are artists and we are servants of the stage, and I take both jobs very seriously. As artists, we work as a collective-all for one and one for all. As servants, we work for thos who venture out alone, otherwise known as performers.”

— Rebecca Stead

You can have it all, but you can't have it all at once.

— Rebecca Stead

“So mom got the postcard today”

— Rebecca Stead

“I wish I could see what would have hapenned if I hadn't told. You told me once that every time a decision is made, the universe splits into two. So now there's a universe in which I kept my mouth shut. But I can't see what it looks like.”

— Rebecca Stead

“A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.”

— Rebecca Stead

“I do try to write in ways that reflect reality, and I think that reality is rarely simple.”

— Rebecca Stead

“As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.”

— Rebecca Stead

“I think things hit me very hard, and I wish I had allowed things to roll off my back a little bit more.”

— Rebecca Stead

'Middle school' is used as shorthand for a time when things change. It's a time a lot of kids feel like they don't even have one good friend.

— Rebecca Stead

“Mostly what I try to do is build emotion. Only I'd prefer not to do it by telling you about emotion but by pushing that emotion down.”

— Rebecca Stead

“My kids really like food, and they like to cook, so it's a lot of fun to shop with them.”

— Rebecca Stead

“The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that no one is stopping you. There's no one saying, 'You can't do that.'”

— Rebecca Stead

“I am hoping to work with writers publishing books for first time, since I of course remember what that experience is like. It's all a bit of a mystery for new authors who don't know what to expect.”

— Rebecca Stead

“I asked myself what it was that I wanted from writing and where my connection with books began, and the answer to that question was definitely in childhood, because that's where my connection with reading began.”

— Rebecca Stead

I grew up mostly an only child. My dad remarried when I was a teenager. And then I had two stepbrothers. And then my dad had a second child. So I have a brother from the time I was 15. But I really grew up feeling like an only child.

— Rebecca Stead

“I like the idea of a world, even within a big giant city, where you're not anonymous. You have an identity, and that's an identity that's known just sort of by shopkeepers. I felt that as a kid, and I loved it.”

— Rebecca Stead

I never had a favourite book! I liked all kinds of things - science fiction, so I read Heinlen and Ray Bradbury, and I also liked reading about kids like myself, so I read Judy Blume and Norma Klein and Paula Danzinger and a lot of other writers. I also read James Herriot!

— Rebecca Stead

I personally find the ideas that girls need to cover their shoulders in school a little bit strange ... when we're telling girls, you know, 'You have to cover your shoulders because otherwise you're a distraction to other people in your class,' probably something is wrong.

— Rebecca Stead

“I think that my first book - I was trying to write the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. So it's sort of, like, a book inspired by my childhood reading and the passion that I felt about reading when I was a kid.”

— Rebecca Stead

“I think we must all feel that there are people out there who know things about our young selves, you know, our early, early lives, that no one else can ever know.”

— Rebecca Stead

I would never look a gift horse in the mouth. I've had some lovely homemade earrings and, recently, a wall hanging made in the style of Georges Seurat.

— Rebecca Stead

“I've met seven homeschooling families through many, many extracurricular activities such as fencing. I don't have a point of view of homeschooling. For some families, homeschooling works.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I'd been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent.”

— Rebecca Stead

There was a boy in my building who was my best friend when I was growing up. There was also a mysterious person on my corner who we called the Laughing Man.

— Rebecca Stead

“The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it's a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.”

— Rebecca Stead

“Beautiful and fresh, Girl Saves Boy is full of the absolute truth-life is complicated. I could not put it down.”

— Rebecca Stead