Quotes from Mitch Albom

Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.

Life has to end. Love doesn't.

Going back to something is harder than you think.

The truth is, when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads -none of us ever got enough of that. We all yearn in some way to return to those days when we were completely taken care of - unconditional love, unconditional attention. Most of us didn't get enough.

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

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

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.

One day can bend your life.

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

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.

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 explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.

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.

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

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 crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart.

Holding on to things only breaks your heart.

Giving to other people makes me feel alive. Not my car or my house. Not what I look like in the mirror. When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad...

We need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn't do. All the things we should have done. You can't get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.

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

There is a big confusion in this country over what we want verses what we need...you need food. You want a chocolate sundae.

No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

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.

Knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing.

Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.

Without love we all like birds with broken wings.