Quotes from Sue Halpern

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.

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

But it's a little like that children's book, THE VELVETEEN RABBIT, but in reverse: if you're not loved for who you are, you cease to be real. Definitely for the other person, and maybe for yourself, too.

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,

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 realize no one thinks being a librarian is as awesome as being a neurosurgeon, but I always thought I was doing something valuable, putting books in the hands of readers. Books can save lives, too. I really believe that.

I don't think she's being mysterious on purpose. It's like she can't help it. She's not shy--she'll talk to anyone--and she's not exactly distant, but even so, she's unreachable, as if there's an invisible fence around her, or a force field the repels whatever gets too close.

Though we are made of memories, we live only in the here and now.

Trauma is not just one thing.

Somewhere in the unfolding story, something is going to happen that will change everything that happens after it.

What you're thinking of as the end of the story now, is only the end of the chapter.

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.

the reward for getting through life is getting life itself.

The unasked-for gift of being with people at the end of their lives...is a simple but profound appreciation of the here and now of life itself.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who

goodness is ours to dispense. It's a currency that each of us gets to invent and denominate. David's had pictures of Chopin and Keith Richards on it. Mine had my dog.

Everyone's life is an unfolding story, and all stories have good guys and bad guys, and all stories have conflicts and resolutions, and all stories--if they are interesting--have drama.

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

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.

If we are lucky, we get to live very long and healthy lives. If we are even luckier, we will be astonished by the sight of blue jays all the way through.

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.

People who don't think the rules apply to them, Kit was beginning to learn, are surprised and offended when others don't recognize and honor their exemption.

One thing I can suggest is that when you start to go to a dark place, for you to consciously redirect your thoughts. Mind over mind. Make yourself think of something completely different. An image of something joyful or silly, and focus on that.

It was as if her mind were a theater where bad actors could be run off the stage by a pack of adorable, yelping dogs.