Quotes from Harold S. Kushner

If a person has known love, has felt and given love, that person's life has made a difference.

You are not a prisoner of your past; you are the architect of your future.

Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can't feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When we understand that, our question will change from, "Why do we have to feel pain?" to "What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?

We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be.

One of the most important differences between Judaism and Christianity is that we were a people before we had a religion.........throughout it all, it is the participation in the community that defines us as Jews; the creeds and rituals are secondary.

Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.

for all those people who wanted to go on believing, but whose anger at God made it hard for them to hold on to their faith and be comforted by religion.

Until I die, I will maintain my integrity.

My friends have forgotten me, My dependents and maidservants respond to me as a stranger. Summon my servant but he does not respond¦ My odor is repulsive to my wife, I am loathsome to my children.

One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick.

Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it. God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it. Forced to choose between a good God who is not totally powerful, or a powerful God who is not totally good, the author of the Book of Job chooses to believe in God's goodness.

This is what it means to create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos. A creative scientist or historian does not make up facts but orders facts; he sees connections between them rather than seeing them as random data. A creative writer does not make up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us.