Best 16 quotes of Sue Halpern on MyQuotes

A culture that values only what has succeeded before, where the first rule of success is that there must be something 'measured' and counted, is not a culture that will sustain alternatives to market-driven 'creativity.

It is essential not only to the souls of painters and poets, who thrive in solitude, but to the rest of us, too--individuals whose canvas is our lives.

Passion kept one fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive 'nows.'

Trusting each other is the beginning of a certain secular faith, a faith that allows us to live in families and communities and nations. Democracy, above all other forms of government, requires this faith.

Trust, which is a virtue, is also a habit, like prayer. It requires exercise. And just as no one can run five miles a day and cede the cardiovascular effects to someone else, no one can trust for us.

We are made of memories and formed by experience. I keep wondering what kind of people we would be, and what kind of world this would be, if when bad things happened we could erase them, or somehow make them sweet.

Anger could be like pain: you think it's your ankle that hurts when it's actually your knee. Anger could be referred.

But then I tell myself that it wasn't as if justice was going to be served no matter what I did. Justice didn't stand a chance. And I hate that. I hate that I stopped believing in things I didn't even know were matters of belief, like justice and fairness. Or honesty. Or the promises people make to each other. Of all the things Cal took from me, that's when I think I miss the most: the apparently naïve belief that you kept your promises. You know what the prosecutor told me? ;Everyone cheats,' as if that was supposed to make it all right.

Fiction, nonfiction. Biography, memoir. Science, psychology. History. Everything had its place. That was the beauty of libraries. No surprise except when someone screwed up, or was lazy, or was a thief.

Freedom, he was learning, was not a set point, like the temperature at which water freezes, but something mutable, a moving target.

I already told you a ghost story," she said at last. "The one where the wife was invisible to the husband and the truth of the marriage was invisible to her.

If you know haw a book is going to end, would you read it in the first place?" Kit asked herself later, as she stood in the bathroom, an electric toothbrush winding its way around her mouth. "Do you stop reading a book because you don't want to watch the characters you like turn out to be unlikable, or the ones with which you identify denied the happy ending you believe they deserve?

I think it's possible that when you think that the future might bring great sadness, you become more generous that you ever has been before, so you can carry other people's happiness with you.

It's stupid, really," I began again. "But it was this thing I read someplace, and it really got to me. It said that a dictionary is every book ever written and every book that will be written, just in a different order. And it seemed magical. You could own every book just by owning one book. I loved that. And I just had to have it,

Trauma is not just one thing.

We understood that Genesis wasn't the first story but, rather, that the creation of Genesis was. I'd go into the classroom prepared to discuss whatever book or poem or passage was on that day's agenda, and sometimes, against all odds, those discussions were spirited and engaging, and they told me everything I needed to know about my future as a teacher: I had none. It was books I was drawn to--the smell of them, the feel of them, the way they invaded and captured me--not talking about books. I enrolled in library school and got a part-time job as a used-book store, taking orders over the phone.