Mitch Albom

“What do people fear most about death? I asked the reb."Fear?" he thought for a moment. 'Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?"That's big."Yes. But there's something else."What else?He leaned forward."Being forgotten," he whispered.”

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

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

“Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.”

“I didn't want to be ordinary," I mumbled.My mother looked up. "What ordinary, Charley?""You know. Someone you forget."From the other room came the squeals of children. Miss Thelma turned her chin to the sound. She smiled,"That's what keeps me from being forgotten.”

“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?”

“But a desperate heart will seduce the mind.”

“Going back to something is harder than you think.”

“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...”

“Fear is how you lose your life...a little bit at a time...What we give to fear, we take away from...faith.”

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

“In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you're too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

“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.”

“I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites.”

“As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on--in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”

“Then why do we do so many bad things?He sighed. “Because one thing God gave us—and I’m afraid it’s at times a little too much—is free will. Freedom to choose. I believe he gave us everything needed to build a beautiful world, if we choose wisely.”

“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".”

“...But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.”

“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.”