On 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' by Mitch Albom

• 'But all endings are also beginnings.  We just don't know it at the time.'
• 'Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else.  Instead, he did what we all do.  He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come.'
• 'EVERY LIFE HAS one true-love snapshot.'
• 'NO STORY SITS by itself.  Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.'
• 'But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.'
• 'People often belittle the place where they were born.  But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.'
• 'People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains.  But scenery without solace is meaningless.'
• 'Take one story, viewed from two different angles.  It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily... and the other ends badly.'
• '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.'
• 'Fairness... does not govern life and death.  If it did, no good person would ever die young.'
• '...all lives intersect.  That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.'
• 'Strangers... are just family you have yet to come to know.'
• 'No life is a waste.  The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.'
• 'War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too.'
• 'Time... is not what you think.  Dying? Not the end of everything.  We think it is.  But what happens on earth is only the beginning.'
• 'That's what heaven is.  You get to make sense of your yesterdays.'
• 'Sacrifice is a part of life.  It's supposed to be.  It's not something to regret.  It's something to aspire to.  Little sacrifices.  Big sacrifices.'
• 'Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it.  You're just passing it on to someone else.'
• '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.'
• 'Things that happen before you are born still affect you... And people who come before your time affect you as well.  We move through places everyday that would never have been if not for those who came before us.  Our workplaces, where we spend so much time - we often think they began with our arrival.  That's not true.'
• 'Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge.'
• '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.'
• 'PEOPLE SAY THEY "find" love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock.  But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man or woman.  What people find then is a certain love.'
• 'LOVE, LIKE RAIN, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a certain joy.  But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries from the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.'
• 'Lost love is still love, Eddie.  It takes a different form, that's all.  You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor.  But when those senses weaken, another heightens.  Memory.  Memory becomes your partner.  You nurture it.  You hold it.  You dance with it.  Life has to end.  Love doesn't.'