Mitch Albom

“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.”

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

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

“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...”

“If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it's going to happen anyhow.”

“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.”

“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....”

“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.”

“Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.”

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

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

“What was the constant? Movement. Yes. With time there was always movement. The setting sun. The dripping water. The pendulums. The spilling sand. To realize his destiny, such movement had to cease. He had to stop the flow of time completely …”

“A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers.”

“Nobody's favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody's favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books?”

“A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what separates a life story that can influence other people.”

“I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this some...”

“Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.”

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”

“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...”

“When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.”

“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.”

“Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.”

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

“Life is a series of pulls back and forth... A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. Most of us live somewhere in the middle. A wrestling match...Which side win? Love wins. Love always wins”

“Love wins, love always wins.”

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

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

“Kids chase the love that eludes them.”

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

“Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them.”

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

“You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.”

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

“There are five people you meet in heaven. 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. This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it ex...”

“Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward.”

“I thought about the days i had handed over to a bottle..the nights i can't remember..the mornings i slept thru..all the time spent running from myself.”

“Sometimes, love brings you together even as life keeps you apart.”

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

“Ends are for yesterday, not tomorrows.”

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

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

“Man invents nothing God did not create first.”

“You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 c...”

“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 he smiles it's as if you'd just told him the first joke on earth.”

“What is false about hope?”

“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.”

“Every life has one true love snapshot.”

“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...”

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

“In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.”

“People often belittle the place where they were born but heaven can be found in the most unlikely places.”

“Your father was no longer a young man. he was already in his fifties.' Fifty-six,' Eddie said blankly. Fifty-six,' the old woman repeated. 'His body had been weakened, the ocean had left him vulnerable, pneumonia took hold of him, and in time, he died.' Because of Mickey?' Eddie said. Because of loy...”

“I took my orders, too. But if i couldn't keep you alive, I thought I could at least keep you together. In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.”

“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 th...”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“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 f...”

“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 e...”

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

“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 sa...”

“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.”

“Have you found someone to share your heart with? Are you giving to your community? Are you at peace with yourself? Are you trying to be as human as you can be?”

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