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Happiness Quote by Rita Mae Brown

"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory"

About this Quote

Happiness, Brown suggests, isn’t only a triumph of gratitude or mindfulness; it’s also a tactical act of forgetting. The line lands because it flips the usual self-help piety: we’re told to remember lessons, honor wounds, keep receipts. Brown’s wry contrarianism implies that memory, revered as identity’s backbone, is just as often a weapon we aim at ourselves. A “bad memory” becomes not a deficit but a survival skill, the psychological equivalent of refusing to rewatch your own worst scenes in high definition.

The intent feels less like endorsing stupidity than puncturing the romance of emotional bookkeeping. There’s a sly acknowledgement here of rumination culture before the term existed: the obsessive replay of slights, failures, and old humiliations that masquerades as moral seriousness. Brown’s joke is that many of us confuse being accurate with being wise. Perfect recall can make you righteous, but it rarely makes you free.

The subtext carries a writer’s suspicion of narrative. Memory is editing; it’s selective, biased, occasionally fictional. By calling the “bad” version a key, Brown hints that happiness depends on choosing which story stays in the spotlight and which gets cut in revisions. That resonates with her broader sensibility as a sharp-tongued, politically alert author: resilience isn’t passive. It’s an active refusal to let every injury become a life sentence.

Contextually, it also reads as a rebuttal to an American ethic that treats suffering as proof of depth. Brown shrugs at that prestige. Sometimes the healthiest response is amnesia with boundaries.

Quote Details

TopicHappiness
Source
Later attribution: One of the Keys to Happiness is a Bad Memory. Rita Mae Brown (Notebooks, 2019) modern compilationISBN: 9781086670998 · ID: yJAwyAEACAAJ
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
Rita Mae Brown One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. lined pages, can be used as a notebook, journal, diary or composition book for school and work, notebook 6x9 340 One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. notebook 6x9 ...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Brown, Rita Mae. (2026, February 14). One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-keys-to-happiness-is-a-bad-memory-94381/

Chicago Style
Brown, Rita Mae. "One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory." FixQuotes. February 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-keys-to-happiness-is-a-bad-memory-94381/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory." FixQuotes, 14 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-keys-to-happiness-is-a-bad-memory-94381/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown (born November 28, 1944) is a Writer from USA.

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