Mitch Albom

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

“Embrace aging.”

“I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.”

“In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word "divorce" came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant "divide." In truth, it comes from "divertere," which means "to divert."I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mother's girdle and whether she should marry someone else.”

“Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do somehing else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.”

“My father moved through theys of we,singing each new leaf out of each tree,(and every child was sure that springdanced when she heard my father sing)...”

“If you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down on you anyhow. And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.”

“It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.”

“Love is the only rational act.”

“Be compassionate," Morrie whispered. And take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place."He took a breath, then added his mantra: "Love each other or die.”

“And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

“There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind...”

“Holding anger is a poison...It eats you from inside...We think that by hating someone we hurt them...But hatred is a curved blade...and the harm we do to others...we also do to ourselves.”

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

“Fairness," he said, 'does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.”

“It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.”

“The truth is, part of me is every age. I’m a three-year-old, I’m a five-year-old, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old, I’m a fifty-year-old. I’ve been through all of them, and I know what it’s like. I delight in being a child when it’s appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own.”

“The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

“You see, you closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too--even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.”

“I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.”

“For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.”

“There was a pier filled with thousands of people, men and women, fathers and mothers and children--so many children--children from the past and the present, children who had not yet been born, side by side, hand in hand, in caps, in short pants, filling the boardwalk and the rides and the wooden platforms, sitting on each other's shoulders, sitting in each other's laps. They were there, or would be there, becuause of the simple mundane things [he] had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day. And while their lips did not move, [he] heard their voices, more voices then he could have imagined, and a peace came upon him that he had never known before.”

“Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.”

“Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.”

“People say they 'find' love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. And [he] found a certain love with [her], a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable.”

“Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.”

“The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

“Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”

“...the human spirit knows, deep down that all lives intersect.”

“Scenery without solace is meaningless.”

“This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.”

“Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.”

“People often belittle the place where they were born.”

“No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”

“There is a big confusion in this country over what we want verses what we need...you need food. You want a chocolate sundae.”

“Without love we all like birds with broken wings.”

“My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce.”

“Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

“I like myself better when I'm with you.”

“Don't cling to things because everything is impermanent.”

“One day can bend your life.”

“No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we're alone.”

“Love wins, love always wins.”

“It is no coincidence that the words 'trying' and 'dying' are only a few letters apart.”

“Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

“Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.”

“Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own. Most people can't do it.”

“You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself.”

“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”