Sue Halpern Quotations

Hanukkah represents the eight days that oil burned in the temple when there was only enough to burn for one night. Our gathering this year has even more meaning in light of recent events. As small as our Jewish group has become that's met in Diamondhead for 20 years, it's important that we be together. No one remains untouched by the hurricane.

Last week I said, 'You know, I think maybe the kids might need prom clothes.' They immediately sent out emails to every Jewish organization in the entire country on Tuesday. And by Friday, the clothes started arriving.

The resident kvetch of 60 Minutes. an unabashed fogy.

These kids have lost everything, lost absolutely everything you owned. And they're so excited and they're touching the clothes. These kids have touched my heart, you know. I feel a responsibility to them, so it makes me feel good.

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 ...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'