Mitch Albom
Sportswriter, novelist, newspaper columnist for the Detroit Free Press, syndicated radio host, and TV commentator.
"One withers, another grows."
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they are 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.
This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.
"Life has to end." Marguerite said. "Love doesn't"
"Death ends a life, not a relationship."
No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.
Before he can devote himself to God or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation.
"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."
"When you learn how to die, you learn how to live."
"What is it about silence that makes people uneasy?"
"Without love, we are birds with broken wings."
"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."
"Ah." The Blue Man nodded. "Well people often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps. This, for me, is the second. And for you the first."
"If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it."
Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.
"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."
"That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays."
"There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "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."
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.
"Each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."