Mitch Albom

“Sacrifice,” The Captain said. “You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost.You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.”

“The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate who left campus that day headed for New York city, ready to offer the world his talent. The world, I discovered. was not all that interested.”

“Keadilan tidak mengatur persoalan hidup dan mati.Kalau keadilan yg mengatur,tidak akan ada orang baik mati muda.”

“Orang-orang asing adalah keluarga yang belum kau kenal.”

“No matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don't see what we could be.”

“Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.”

“If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them - you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, "All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.”

“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.”

“Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”

“You don't know how to live until you learn how to die.”

“This is part of what a family is about, not just love. It's knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame. Not work.”

“I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don't allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that's all.”

“Cuando cae un rayo después de que te hayas ido, o se estrella un avión en el que podrías haber estado. Cuando tu compañero de trabajo enferma y tú no. Creemos que esas cosas son fortuitas, pero hay un equilibrio en todo. Uno se marchita, otro crece. El nacimiento y la muerte forman parte de un todo.”

“Cinta yang menang. Cinta selalu menang"(hal 42, Selasa Bersama Morrie)”

“Begitu kita ingin tahu bagaimana kita akan mati, berarti kita belajar tentang bagaimana kita harus hidup" (hal 87, Selasa Bersama Morrie)”

“That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate onw life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.”

“All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you." Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. "What?" he said. "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.”

“You have one family, Charley. For good or bad. You have one family. You can’t trade them in. You can’t lie to them. You can’t run two at once, substituting back and forth.“Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.”

“Suddenly, details seemed extremely important. Details were something to grab on to, a way to insert myself into the story.”

“I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart. ”

“She put one hand on mine. “When someone is in your heart, they’re never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.”

“It’s funny. I met a man once who did a lot of mountain climbing. I asked him which was harder, ascending or descending? He said without a doubt descending, because ascending you were so focused on reaching the top, you avoided mistakes.The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature,” he said. “You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.”

“A child embarrassed by his mother,” she said, “is just a child who hasn’t lived long enough.”

“By now, the morning sun was just over the horizon and it came at me like a sidearm pitch between the houses of my old neighborhood. I shielded my eyes. This being early October, there were already piles of leaves pushed against the curb—more leaves than I remembered from my autumns here—andless open space in the sky. I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.”

“But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.”

“Courage is confused with picking up arms and cowardness is confused with laying them down.”

“Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say.”

“I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother's death-notice telegram or by his father's corpse in the city morgue.”

“I don't mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don't go around naked, for example. I don't run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big things- how we think, what we value- those you must choose yourself. You can't let anyone-or any society- determine those for you. ' -Morrie Schwartz”

“there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don't have a common set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.”

“Everyone knows they re going to die,' he said again, 'but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.”

“ness-that Morrie was looking at life from some very different place than anyone else I knew. A healthier place. A more sensible place. And he was about to die.But it was also becoming clear to me- through his courage, his humor, his patience, and his openIf some mystical clarity of thought came when you looked death in the eye, then I knew Morrie wanted to share it. ”

“Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.”

“Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”

“So, have we solved the secret of happiness?"I believe so," he saidAre you going to tell me?"Yes.Ready?"Ready."Be satisfied."That's it?"Be greatful."That's it?"For what you have.For the love you receive.And for what God has given you."That's it?He looked me in the eye.Then he sighed deeply."That's it.”

“With Marguerite, he wanted only time—more and more time—and he was granted it, nighttimes and daytimes and nighttimes again.”

“We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time--we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.”

“Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all.”

“You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes."Do they ever make more sense?"No.”

“When he went blundering back to God,His songs half written, his work half done,Who knows what paths his bruised feet trod,What hills of peace or pain he won?I hope God smiled and took his hand,And said, "Poor truant, passionate fool!Life’s book is hard to understand:Why couldst thou not remain at school?"A poem by Charles Hanson Towne”

“You are not your past.”

“When a baby comes into the world, its 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 his lesson." "What lesson?" I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. "We can take nothing with us.”

“You can touch everything and be connected to nothing.”

“Lines formed at Ruby Pier- just as a line formed someplace else; five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered- why she lived and what she lived for. 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.”

“Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from the inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. Forgive, Edward. Forgive...no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it.'She touched his hand.'You need to forgive your father.”

“He never spoke of that night again, not to your mother, not to anyone else. He was ashamed for her, for Mickey, for himself. In the hospital, he stopped speaking altogether. Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge. His thoughts still haunted him.'~pg 139”

“His body had been weakened, the ocen had left him vulnerable, pneumonia took ahold of him, and in time, he died.'Because of Mickey?' Eddie said.Because of loyalty,' she said.People don't die because of loyalty.'They don't?' She smiled. 'Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?... Better,... to be loyal to one another.'~pg 138”

“Things that happen before you are born still affect you,' she said. 'And people who come before your time affect you as well.We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time- we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.'She tapped her fingertips together. 'If not for Emile, I would have no husband. IF not for our marriage, there would be no pier. If there'd been no pier, you would not have ended up working there.”

“Ain't you supposed to have peace when you die?'You have peace,' the old woman said, 'when you make it with yourself.”

“You didn't get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father... Rabazzo didn't die for nothing, you know. He sacrificed for his country, and his family knew it, and his kid brother went on to become a good soldier and a great man because he was inspired by it. I didn't die for nothing, either. That night, we might have all driven over that land mine. Then the four of use would have been gone.'Eddie shook his head. 'But you...' He lowered his voice. 'You lost your life.'The Captain smacked his tongue on his teeth. 'That's the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it onto someone else... I shot you, all right... and you lost something, but you gained something as well. You just don't know that yet. I gained something, too... I got to keep my promise. I didn't leave you behind.”