Mitch Albom

“Timing is everything. That´s right. Which is why our sages tell us to repent exactly one day before we die." But how do you know it´s the day before you die? I asked. He raised his eyebrows. "Exactly”

“And if you don´t commit? I asked. Your choice. But you miss what´s on the other side. What´s on the other side? "Ah" he smiled. "A happiness you cannot find alone”

“Getting old we can deal with. Being old is the problem”

“Having more does not keep you from wanting more. And if you always want more - to be richer, more beautiful, more well known - you are missing the bigger picture, and I can tell you from experience, happiness will never come”

“To these people, unhappiness was a condition, an intolerable state of affairs. If pills could help, pills were taken. But pills were not going to change the fundamental problem in the construction. Wanting what you can´t have. Looking for self-worth in the mirror. Layering work on top of work and still wondering why you weren´t satisfied - before working some more.”

“When she says, 'How can you ask if I love you? Look at all I've done with you. What else would you call it?'That kind of love-the kind you realize you already have by the life you've created together-that's the kind that lasts.”

“Instead, he did what we all do. He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come.”

“I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.”

“Belief, hard work, love–you have those things, you can do anything.”

“Now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.”

“Listen. You should know something. All younger people should know something. If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.”

“Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”

“I have come to teach you that there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind. ... Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel that they should?It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between taken and being missed, lives are changed. ...there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. ...The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

“Now that child reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, it's hands are clenched, right? Like this?"He made a fist."Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say 'The whole world is mine.'"But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson."What lesson? I asked.He stretched open his empty fingers."We can take nothing with us.”

“it's natural to die...the fact that we make a big hullabaloo over it, is all because we don't see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we're human we're somethin above nature...we are not. Everything that gets born, dies.”

“Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.”

“Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.”

“This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have.”

“You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you competitive. And, age is not a competitive issue.”

“It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”

“Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is".”

“There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.”

“The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.”

“But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.”

“We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks—we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?”

“Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.”

“Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily... and the other ends badly.”

“You should be convinced of the authenticity of what you have, but you must also be humble enough to say that we don't know everything. And since we don't know everything, we must accept that another person may believe something else.”

“Secrets, they'll tear you apart.”

“So many times, I had chosen not to be with her. Too busy. Too tires. Don't feel like dealing with it. Church? No thanks. Sinner? Sorry. Come down to visit? Can't do it, maybe next week.”

“She was like a wound beneath an old bandage, and he had grown more used to the bandage.”

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

“Lost love is still love.”

“Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?”

“Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can’t explain, something that created it all at the end of the search.“And no matter how far they try to go the other way – to extend life, play around with the genes, clone this, clone that, live to one hundred and fifty – at some point, life is over. And then what happens? When the life comes to an end?”I shrugged.“You see?”He leaned back. He smiled.“When you come to the end, that’s where God begins.”

“Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen.”

“Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”

“and that is what heaven is for, for understanding your life on Earth.”

“One withers, another grows.”

“There are no random acts.”

“No. You can't work your way into heaven. Anytime you try and justify yourself with works, you disqualify yourself with works. What I do here, every day, for the rest of my life, is only my way of saying, 'Lord, regardless of what eternity holds for me, let me give something back to you. I know it doesn't even no scorecard. But let me make something of my life before I go.. and then, Lord, I'm at your mercy.”

“Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Daxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions are spent purchasing them. You don't even need a specific trauma, just 'general depression' is enough, or anxiety, as if sadness is as treatable as the common cold.”

“Reading "For One More Day". Nothing interesting happened yet. Exciting to keep reading.”

“But love takes many forms, and it is not the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love.”

“But our eyes are different, what you see ain't what I see.”

“It's the thinking that gets you killed.”

“Adam hid in the Garden of Eden. Moses tried to substitute his brother. Jonah jumped a boat and was swallowed by a whale...Man likes to run from God. It's a tradition.”

“That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays”

“Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.”

“No one gets left behind, remember?”