Quotes from Mitch Albom

When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this? He made a fist. Why? Because a baby not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say the whole world is mine. But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned his lesson. What lesson? I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. We can take nothing with us.

When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness.

It's not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It's part of the deal we made.

That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays

Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.

It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that 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.

Ends are for yesterday, not tomorrows.

Courage is confused with picking up arms and cowardness is confused with laying them down.

If we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love, and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of 'I could have, I should have'. We can sleep in a storm. And when its time, our goodbyes will be complete.

You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.

Learn how to live and you'll know how to die; learn how to die, and you'll know how to live.

You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.

You can feel the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain-- no matter how smart or accomplished--they cry, they yearn, they hurt. But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should have been looking, too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: comfort, love and a peaceful heart.

There are two stories for every life; the one you live, and the one others tell.

Kids chase the love that eludes them.

As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life's moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down. Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity.

But a desperate heart will seduce the mind.

That's because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it.

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.

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.

A heart weighs more when it splits in two; it crashes in the chest like a broken plane.

All I was afraid of is saying good-bye.

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.

You are not your past.