Quotes from Sue Halpern

And most, like me, were drawn to the miracle of the blank page and how, when seeded with letters, it blossomed into words and sentences and paragraphs and stories.

We often talk about "getting out of our comfort zone," but rarely about entering someone else's.

She had carved out this space for herself, carved it, it sometimes felt, with her bare hands. She had made it small and unaccommodating by design. No one else fit. No room.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence . . . —Marianne Moore

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.

A culture that values only what has succeeded before, where the first rule of success is that there must be something to be 'measured' and counted, is not a culture that will sustain alternatives to market-driven 'creativity.' (NYRB, Vol. LX, No. 17)

And it dawned on me that one way to find out if someone is trustworthy is to read her a passage from one of your favorite books and see how she reacts.

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?

A positive. What you've got to believe, Kit, is that there are very few situations in life that are one hundred percent bad. Did you know that two years after becoming paralyzed, most paraplegics say that their life is better off than when they could walk? We are an adaptive species. Try to embrace 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 no longer know that story. The narrator is unreliable.

There was an end, and it colors everything, even the beginning.

Don't assume that what happens in our future invalidates what happened in our past.

Without meaning to, I've become the neighborhood weirdo.

You know when you are on the highway and you stop at a rest area and there's a big map of the region and a big red dot that says YOU ARE HERE? That's anger. That's what anger can tell you. It can tell you where you are.

the truth was not, despite popular opinion, objective. "Your truth and my truth are not necessarily the same thing, and yet neither is false.

stories are not just in books or movies. 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.

The only completely consistent people are dead.

For loving-kindness to be real, for it to have moral value, he observed, it must be practiced with consideration "of the other's distress alone".

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

But it could also be willful and unrelenting, pushing memories to the forefront of her brain, like rude people cutting in line. And not just rude, but people who were noisy and smelly and daring you to challenge them.

It is not to diffuse you that you were born of you your mother and father, it is to identify you...Walt Whitman

I loved libraries, because that is where I found all of them, and that was where I could hand them off to others.

This is how it happens," he said again, quietly and near tears. "They go, one by one, and before you know it, the room is empty.