"I've a grand memory for forgetting"
About this Quote
A playful boast turns ordinary wisdom upside down. Rather than flaunting total recall, Stevenson celebrates the ability to let go. The phrase is comic and paradoxical, but it names a real human skill: selective forgetting. Memory that knows what to drop preserves what matters. It sifts bitterness from experience, keeps the savor while losing the sediment, and opens space for surprise.
Stevenson often defended the pleasures of romance and rereading. He joked that he could return to beloved adventure tales because plots and particulars slipped away, leaving only the mood. When details fade, wonder returns; the second journey feels fresh because the road has been recharted in mist. That is less a confession of weakness than an argument for how stories work on us. We do not carry novels as inventories of facts; we keep their weather, their gait, the rhythm they set in the heart. A grand memory for forgetting preserves the music by letting the notes disperse.
As a writer, he knew that invention depends on pruning. Too perfect a memory can imprison the imagination in the exactness of sources. Forgetting softens edges so the mind can recombine, compress, and idealize. It also helps the stylist avoid imitation. What remains after forgetting is tone, not transcript; essence, not echo.
The line also speaks to a way of living. Stevenson, often ill and frequently traveling, cultivated buoyancy. The art of forgetting lightens the pack: grudges, social slights, the unproductive part of pain. It is not denial, but a disciplined amnesia that clears room for cheerfulness and courage. Victorian culture prized feats of recall; Stevenson gently rebels, proposing that the opposite faculty guards happiness.
Witty and self-deprecating, the remark reframes a common flaw as a human technology. To remember how to forget is to keep life rereadable, to meet old joys as if they were new, and to carry forward the truth without the weight of every fact.
Stevenson often defended the pleasures of romance and rereading. He joked that he could return to beloved adventure tales because plots and particulars slipped away, leaving only the mood. When details fade, wonder returns; the second journey feels fresh because the road has been recharted in mist. That is less a confession of weakness than an argument for how stories work on us. We do not carry novels as inventories of facts; we keep their weather, their gait, the rhythm they set in the heart. A grand memory for forgetting preserves the music by letting the notes disperse.
As a writer, he knew that invention depends on pruning. Too perfect a memory can imprison the imagination in the exactness of sources. Forgetting softens edges so the mind can recombine, compress, and idealize. It also helps the stylist avoid imitation. What remains after forgetting is tone, not transcript; essence, not echo.
The line also speaks to a way of living. Stevenson, often ill and frequently traveling, cultivated buoyancy. The art of forgetting lightens the pack: grudges, social slights, the unproductive part of pain. It is not denial, but a disciplined amnesia that clears room for cheerfulness and courage. Victorian culture prized feats of recall; Stevenson gently rebels, proposing that the opposite faculty guards happiness.
Witty and self-deprecating, the remark reframes a common flaw as a human technology. To remember how to forget is to keep life rereadable, to meet old joys as if they were new, and to carry forward the truth without the weight of every fact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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