Mitch Albom

“The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.”

“Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?"”

“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.”

“Be compassionate ... and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be a better place.”

“Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?..”

“You can feel the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain-- no matter how smart or accomplished--they cry, they yearn, they hurt. But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should have been looking, too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: comfort, love and a peaceful heart.”

“You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.”

“Tell you what. After I'm dead, you talk. And I'll listen.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.”

“We all have the same beginning - birth - and we all have the same end - death. So how different can we be?”

“Do the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back.”

“You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you’ve find meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward.”

“When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“We’re gonna make up for that. We’re gonna live a long time together.”

“When you're in bed, you're dead”

“Death: the only true emotion felt in an apathetic world”

“Love wins. Love always wins.”

“As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you'd always be 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 the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”

“Love each other or perish.”

“Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.”

“Don't hang on too long, but don't let go too soon.”

“Without love, we are birds with broken wings.”

“Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?”

“If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.”

“There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things" -he sighed- "these things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?”

“If we can remember the feeling of love we once had, we can die without ever going away.”

“What is it about silence that makes people uneasy?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Fairness doesn't govern life and death. If it did, no good man would ever die young.”

“It is because the spirit knows deep down that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else. And in that small distance, lives are changed.”

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

“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.”

“One withers, another grows.”

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

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

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

“Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish”

“It's only horrible if you see it that way," Morrie said. "It's horrible to watch my body slowly wilt away to nothing. But it's also wonderful because of all the time I get to say good-bye."”

“The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

“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.”

“Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. 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’.”

“.. when all this started, I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?' I decided I'm going to live - or at least try to live - the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humour, with composure.”

“It's natural to die," he said again. "The fact that we make such 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 something above nature."”

“This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died—what I call your ‘spiritual security’—knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.”

“What a waste.. All those people saying all those wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it.”

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

“Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas.”

“What was the constant?”

“..And because he was still able to move his hands - Morrie always spoke with both hands waving - he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.”

“There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I'm so angry and bitter. But it doesn't last too long. Then I get up and say, 'I want to live..'”

“His eyes were more sunken than I remembered them, and his cheekbones more pronounced. This gave him a harsher, older look - until he smiled, of course, and the sagging cheeks gathered up like curtains.”

“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.”

“Sacrfice," the captain said. "You made one. I made one. We all made 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.”

“I used to be a classic workaholic, and after seeing how little work and career really mean when you reach the end of your life, I put a new emphasis on things I believe count more. These things include: family, friends, being part of a community, and appreciating the little joys of the average day.”

“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’.”

“One day spent with someone you love can change everything.”

“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.”

“Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.”

“I'm on the last great journey here--and people want me to tell them what to pack.”

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

“So, have we solved the secret of happiness?”

“Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. It’s not so much, what’s the point? It’s more like, what’s the difference?”

“I used to think I knew everything. I was a "smart person" who "got things done," and because of that, the higher I climbed, the more I could look down and scoff at what seemed silly or simple, even religion.”

“I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day.”

“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.”

“When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness.”

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

“With endless time, nothing is special. With no loss or sacrifice, we can’t appreciate what we have”

“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. ”

“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.”

“Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.”

“That's what we're all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing." Which is? "Make peace with living.”

“If we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love, and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of ‘I could have, I should have’. We can sleep in a storm. And when its time, our goodbyes will be complete.”

“He told her the new names. No more Dippers or Tumble Bugs. Everything was the Blizzard, the Mind Bender, Top Gun, the Vortex. "Sounds strange, doesn't it?" Eddie said.”

“Ends are for yesterday, not tomorrows.”

“He looked at his own arms and realized, in his earthly body, he was now older than his father. He had outlived him in every way.”

“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?”

“When you are measuring life, you are not living it.”

“It is too late."”

“Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”

“It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.”

“After the funeral, my life changed. I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough.”

“I wrote articles about rich athletes who, for the most part, could not care less about people like me.”

“But I can sit here with my dwindling days and look at what I think is important in life.”

“Holding him like that moved me in a way I cannot describe, except to say I felt the seeds of death inside his shrivelling frame, and as I laid him in his chair, adjusting his head on the pillows, I had the coldest realisation that our time was running out.”

“If some mystical clarity of thought came when you looked death in the eye, then I knew Morrie wanted to share it. And I wanted to remember it for as long as I could.”

“As my visits with Morrie go on, I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that hold it -so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.”