Quotes by Mitch Albom

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.

Heres the thing, he said. People see me as a bridge. Im not as alive as I used to be, but Im not yet dead. Im sort of...in-between

Ted, he said, 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 Im going to live-or at least try to live-the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.

But everyone knows someone who has died, I said. Why is it so hard to think about dying?Because, Morrie continued, most of us walk around as if were sleepwalking. We really dont experience the world fully, because were half asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.And facing death changes all that?Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.He sighed. Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.

the word dyting is not synonymous with the word useless

I had told him I was searching for my keys, thats 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.

You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that havent found meaning . Because if youve found meaning in your life, you dont want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You cant wait until sixty-five.

I was astonished by his complete lack of self-pity. Morrie, who could no longer dance, swim, bathe, or walk; Morrie, who could no longer answer his own door, dry himself after a shower, or even roll over in bed. How could he be so accepting? I watched him struggle with a fork, picking at a piece of tomato, missing it the first two times - a pathetic scene, and yet I could not deny that sitting in his presence was almost magically serene, the same calm breeze that soothed me back in college.

I didnt want to forget him. Maybe I didnt want him to forget me.

Had it not been for Nightline, Morrie would have died without ever seeing me again. I had no good excuse for this, except the one that everyone these days seems to have. I had become too wrapped up in the siren song of my life. I was busy.

In the South American rainforest, there is a tribe called the Desana, who see the world as a fixed quantity of energy that flows between all creatures. Every birth must therefore engender a death, and every death brings forth another birth. This way, the energy of the world remains complete.When they hunt for food, the Desana know the animals they kill will leave a hole in the spiritual well. But that hole will be filled, they believe, by the Desana hunters when they die. Were there no men dying, there would be no birds or fish being born. I like this idea. Morrie likes it, too. The closer he gets to goodbye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest. What we take, we must replenish.Its only fair, he says.

In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word divorce came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant divide. In truth, it comes from divertere, which means to divert.I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mothers girdle and whether she should marry someone else.

What happened to me? I asked myself. Morriss high, smoky voice took me back to my university years, when I thought rich people were evil, a shirt and tie were prison clothes, and life without freedom to get up and go - motorcycle beneath you, breeze in your face, down the streets of Paris, into the mountains of Tibet - was not a good life at all. What happened to me?

A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wifes, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth.As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared south, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky.

But my father, a thief in many ways, had robbed me of my concentration.