A Quote by Rebecca Stead

I felt vulnerable and very much between friends. I remember walking down the hallway and thinking I had no way of knowing what was coming, literally. This wasn't because I had some horrific bullying story, but because of a steady drip of negativity.
I was so paranoid that my friends wouldn't like me. I went to a very small school where the consequences of bullying were very real. You couldn't just push some nameless face in the hallway because everybody knew each other's families, so there wasn't the obligatory psychotic jackass that tortured everybody.
I remember the moment when it hit me. I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, and it felt like I was literally walking out of a jail cell that I had been in. At that moment, I realized I could shave if I wanted. It was up to me and no one else.
I love acting, but I am a mom, and the roles just weren't coming because of a mixture of things: because I'm not ambitious, and because I'm older, and I had a baby. I really felt like I had said a graceful and completely happy goodbye to acting in a significant way. And I had sort of made my peace with that.
The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned - because they had to be - and a new kind of coming-of-age and love story emerged that required a different kind of telling the story.
When I started acting, I had a really strong discipline of knowing that you had to be on time, knowing that you had to work 12 to 16 hours a day, knowing you had to be prepared, knowing you had to be ready, and it's very interesting because if you're an artist and you're creating, you can work very, very long hours but as you're putting out that love of creation, it's almost like you're charged by it, you're charged by the process of it.
I feel particularly passionate about being a part of 'Rillington Place' because I've never had a job where I've felt so much responsibility and I've had to handle something with so much delicacy, because this story and these people were real.
I remember being on Hawaii when I sailed to Hawaii. It felt unsettling to be walking around there because I was thinking, "This place could just sink at any second." In actuality, it totally can. But it really felt like, I am this teeny, tiny speck out in the middle of all that water, I feel so unprotected right now. It almost felt creepier than being on a boat, which is an even smaller speck out in the middle of nowhere. But I felt like I had some control over that situation.
My father worked in a factory and as a child it felt very secure. It felt very secure because everybody had work, the schools were free, so there was a security of knowing that the war had finished and families would come together again.
It's hard to mix with a crowd when you're walking down the hallway and everybody else is a foot shorter. I remember hanging out with my friends, like at the mall, and thinking people were staring at me and talking about me. It made me turn inside myself. I became more shy and quiet.
Don't think that only sitting with the eyes closed is practice. If you do think this way, then quickly change your thinking. Steady practice is keeping mindful in every posture, whether sitting, walking, standing or lying down. When coming out of sitting, don't think that you're coming out of meditation, but that you are only changing postures. If you reflect in this way, you will have peace. Wherever you are, you will have this attitude of practice with you constantly. You will have a steady awareness within yourself.
I felt strange in my own family, because I had a very liberal mind, and I would ask myself, "Why is there this discrimination between men and women?" In our culture, the man should be outside and the woman should be at home. I wanted to study, or meet my friends, and I couldn't. And I felt very different.
I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put into writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.
I think I went through early years of my career sort of thinking, "Well, maybe I'm just not British enough." And I always remember my father saying to me, "Don't think you're English, because however English you feel, some Englishman is going to remind you that you're not." Now, for him it must have been a much more acute experience, because he immigrated to England. I was born there, so I kind of felt I had the right to assume that I was British, but it's true. The English are a very warm and welcoming people, but there's a streak in there that reminds you, occasionally.
I'm a person who's coming New York because of the magnetism of the people. I'm not coming because of expectations. I'm coming here because it's a very natural way of sharing. That's the reason. And also friends - I love to be with people I can't meet in Warsaw.
In the middle of the dream I said to myself 'press pause' and in the dream I said I'm going to write this down. But I was so frightened to get out of bed and write it down that I would miss the rest of the story. And I had to know what happens. And I pressed play. When I finished there was a knowing that I would never forget this. I literally had a smile. There was a knowing in my sleep. And here I am. I was actually reading it to my dogs yesterday. I still find it quite incredible.
One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them. Filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present : like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but I t felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between roof-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.
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