When someone is in your heart, they’re never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.
Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.
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 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.
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.
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.
I made such a fool of myself,” she lamented.“Love does not make you a fool.”“He didn’t love me back.”“That does not make you a fool, either.”“Just tell me …” Her voice cracked. “When does it stop hurting?”“Sometimes never.
I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.
I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day.
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.
Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to.
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.
Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.
You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.
It’s such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.
When you are measuring life, you are not living it.
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.
Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.
Sometimes, kids want you to hurt the way they hurt.
No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we’re alone.
When we are most alone is when we embrace another’s loneliness.
Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.
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.
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? Morrie Schwartz
Fear is how you lose your life…a little bit at a time…What we give to fear, we take away from…faith.
We all have same beginning (BIRTH), and we will have same ending (DEATH). So how different can we be?
Be compassionate … and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be a better place.
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.
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.
This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have.
It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody’s out there.
You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship
when he smiles it’s as if you’d just told him the first joke on earth.
Much of what we called “depression” was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures we weren’t willing to work for.
Do you prefer Mitch? Or is Mitchell better?’.. .. Mitch, I say. Mitch is what my friends called me. ‘Well, Mitch it is then,’ Morrie says, as if closing a deal. ‘And, Mitch?’ Yes? ‘I hope one day you will think of me as your friend.
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.
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.
Love- the infatuation kind- ‘he’s so handsome, she’s so beautiful’- that can shrivel. As soon as something goes wrong, that kind of love can fly out the window.
People often belittle the place where they were born but heaven can be found in the most unlikely places.
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?
There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.
Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?”-Morrie
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.
With endless time, nothing is special. With no loss or sacrifice, we can’t appreciate what we have
You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.
It is too late.” The old man shook his head. “It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be.” He smiled. “There is a plan, Dor.
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. Thependulums. The spilling sand. To realize his destiny, such movement had to cease. He had to stop the flowof time completely …
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.
Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?.. He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying.
Rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. He would close his eyes and with a blissful smile begin to move to his own sense of rhythm. It wasn’t always pretty.
A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers.
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.
War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.
You’ve lived through a lot of wars, I said. “Yes.”Do they ever make more sense?”No.
If you really want it, then you’ll make your dream happen.
That was the end of his driving.. That was the end of his walking free.. That was the end of his privacy.. And that was the end of his secret.
You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does.
I earned a mater’s degree in journalism and took the first job offered, as a sports writer. Instead of chasing my own fame, I wrote about famous athletes chasing theirs.
I was cranked to a fifth gear, and everything I did, I did on a deadline.
You have peace,” the old woman said, “when you make it with yourself.
Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”“You bet,” Morrie whispered.
The secret is not to make your music louder. But to make the world quieter.
Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But it is not the same with words. What you do not say can haunt you.
There is a reason you glance up when you first hear a melody, or tap your foot to the sound of a drum. All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?
One must indeed test the strings to this life, bounce the bow, wet the mouthpiece, prepare for the deeper music that follows.
You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.
I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you’ll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.
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.
…But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begins.
The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
..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.
Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.
Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.
The eighties happened. The nineties happened. Death and sickness and getting fat and going bald happened. I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.
Belief, hard work, love–you have those things, you can do anything.
Belief, hard work, love – you have those things, you can do anything.
What is it?”“A prayer.”“For a child?”She nodded.“For me?”Another nod.“On a tree?”“Trees spend all day looking up at God.
If you accept that you can die at any time – then you might not be as ambitious as you are
Why did you measure the days and nights? To know. Sitting high above the city, Father Time realized that knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing.
Heaven . . . is the same feeling. . . . No fear. No dark. When you know you are loved . . . that’s the light.
It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done.
It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch. ” He finally whispered, “We also need to forgive ourselves.
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?
The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.
Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family yo have yet to come to know.
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.
And is often the case with faith, I thought I was being asked a favor, when in fact I was being given one”.
I don’t know what it is about the food your mother makes for you, especially when it’s something that anyone can make – pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad – but it carries a certain taste of memory.
The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.
Loneliness was like an ogre hovering over those activities
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry.
No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.
Didn’t people call New Year’s the loneliest night on the calender? She took comfort in knowing somewhere on the planet, someone might be as miserable as she was.
When you’re rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even thoseyou love.
What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you’re so wrecked it’s hard to believe you ever were a child?
She felt worthless and hollow. There was no hope of fixing this.And when hope is gone, time is punishment.
..I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died.. which I figured was my natural fate.
That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays
When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.
Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from 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.
How do you let go of anger? How do you release a fury you’ve been standing on for so long, you would stumble were it yanked away?
you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it
Memories are not in places, Papa. Memories are in your mind. They’re here, too.
You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you competitive. And, age is not a competitive issue.
The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.
I don’t know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it’s something that anyone can make – pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad – but it carries a certain taste of memory.
Why are we embarassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?
However, this is too harmonious, grand, and overwhelming a universe to believe it all on accident.
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.
They teach you, as children, that you might go to heaven. They never teach you that heaven might come to you.
Once heaven is done with grandma, we’d like her back, thanks.
When you look into your mother’s eyes, you know that is the purest love you can find on this earth.
She was like a wound beneath an old bandage, and he had grown more used to the bandage.
I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn’t want to forget him. Maybe I didn’t want him to forget me.
For many of us, the curtain has just come down on childhood.
Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won’t they, Rose? You want to ask,’Whose child is this?'”Rose chuckled.”But usually, they’re just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.
You see, here’s my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father’s love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.
Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.
Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.
Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas.
Behind all your stories is always your mother’s story. Because hers is where yours begin.
But then, I knew so little about my mother over the last decade of her life. I had been too wrapped up in my own drama.
Going back to something is harder than you think.”I don’t suppose I could have broken my mother’s heart any more if I tried.
Morrie was in a wheelchair full-time now, getting used to helpers lifting him like a heavy sack from the chair to the bed and the bed to the chair.
Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He could have stayed in that moment forever.
This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.
Time,” the Captain said, “is not what you think.” He sat down next to Eddie. “Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.
In a strange way, I envied the quality of Morrie’s time even as I lamented its diminishing supply. Why did we bother with all the distractions we did?
You live on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here…Death ends life, not a relationship.
After all these months, lying there, unable to move a leg or a foot – how could he find perfection in such an average day?Then I realized that was the whole point.
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.
A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me. Morrie would walk that final bridge between life and death, and narrate the trip.
He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems – the way they had always.. because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.
For all that was happening to him, his voice was strong and inviting, and his mind was vibrating with a million thoughts. He was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous with ‘useless’.
Here’s the thing,” he said. “People see me as a bridge. I’m not as alive as I used to be, but I’m not yet dead. I’m sort of…in-between
the word dyting is not synonymous with the word useless
I had told him I was searching for my keys, that’s what had taken me so long in the car, and I squeezed him tighter, as if I could crush my little lie.
He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things “will only break your heart.
I didn’t want to forget him. Maybe I didn’t want him to forget me.
But my father, a thief in many ways, had robbed me of my concentration.
The things you spend so much time on–all this work you do–might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.
None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded. But, … there is no such thing as “too late” in life.
We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”And facing death changes that?”Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials.
I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving, caring souls. How many people can say that?
I missed the crowds in those big stadiums, the flashbulbs, the roaring cheers – the majesty of the whole thing. I missed it bitterly. So did my father. We shared a thirst to return; unspoken, undeniable.
I lifted my eyes, and, for the first time, admitted the truth.”I gave up,” I whispered.”Don’t give up,” she whispered back.
One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus what I want for myself.
There are many things in my life that I wish I could take back. Many moments I would recast.
The little things, I can obey. 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.
You count the hours you could have spent with your mother, it’s a lifetime in itself.
But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begins.
If you don’t have the support and love and caring and connection that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all.
The backside of 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.
At a certain point, your life is more about your legacy to your kids than anything else.
I was a workaholic. I never stopped. I lived in fifth gear. I bought cars. I invested in stocks. I made more money than I had ever imagined.
We all lose somebody we care about and want to find some comforting way of dealing with it, something that will give us a little closure, a little peace.