Quotes From "The Five People You Meet In Heaven"

This is another of those books I bought on impulse, based on its author's reputation and the reading enjoyment its title promised me. I liked Mitch Albom's "Tuesday's With Morrie" so, having caught my interest in his writing, this book was easier to sell to me. As for the title, I have always wondered how other people (authors, in particular) thought about life after death. From what I scribbled on the book's flyleaf, I bought this on December 20, 2003. Very close to Christmas, so we must have been on another of those shopping-cramming jaunts when I spotted this volume. Here are my bookmarked passages:

On Endings:

"...all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."

On True Love:

"Every life has one true-love snapshot."

On Life Stories:

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

On Final Words:

"How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?"

* * *

"...when your time came, it came, and that was that. You mght say something smart on your way out, but you might just as well say something stupid."

On Heaven and birth places:

"People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners."

* * *

"...that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."

* * *

"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."

* * *

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

On the Greatest Gift from God:

"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."

On Random Acts:

"...there are no random acts...we are all connected...you can no ore separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

On Fairness:

"Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."

On Life and Death:

"...all lives intersect...death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

On Strangers:

"Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."

On What We Waste:

"No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

On War, Courage and Cowardice:

"Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because hey want to. Always, they feel they have to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.

* * *

"War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them too."

* * *

" In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to belive in. When you find one, hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole."

On Sacrifices:

"Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

On Parents:

"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."

* * *

"Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away."

On Sons and Fathers:

"...sons will adore their fathers through even the worst behavior. It is how they learn devotion."

* * *

"Before he can devote himself to God or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation."

On Love:

"People say they 'find' love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes any forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love."

On the Secret of heaven:

"...each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

--Mitch Albom

Quotes From "The Choice"

The mid-80s was a particularly difficult period for me. I was then a young father of three small boys faced with problems about getting for them the best early education I could afford as a junior bank officer. The really good schools were quite far from where we lived, so we were forced by circumstances to uproot ourselves just so we could reside nearer these schools. It was a costly decision, to say the least. This was also a time when my bank was hit by financial losses big time so much so that it had to be bailed out by government. And as part of the bail-out plan, the bank implemented a retrenchment program with an attractive financial package.

I was mulling over this retrenchment package when I came upon this Og Mandino book. As you can see, the title is a teaser. I was attracted by the title and was hoping then that I could find the wisdom and inspiration here that I so badly needed at that time. Tonight, as I skimmed through the book to check the passages that I marked, I was struck by a number of interesting parallels (not really exact coincidences) between Mark Christopher's (the book's main character) personal circumstances and my recent predicament--something not obtaining at the time I bought the book. With the passage of time, life seems to have caught up with art, or so it appears to me. Maybe it's just my imagination. Maybe I'm just ...uhm...oh, forget it. Here goes my favorite passages:

On Choices:

"Every day all of us make hundreds of choices, most of them so menial and habitual that they are almost as automatic as breathing."

On Lack of Direction:

"Since so many don't know where they are, or where they're going, they are always struggling merely to survive, always on the razor's edge of disaster, forever on the defensive. When one must live that way, one's options are limited."

On Absentee Fathers:

"What they have is a money-machine that drops in now and then, change its clothes, and leaves again."

On Living Life:

"I'm going to drop this silly rat race I've managed to get myself into, count the blessings I already have, and let the rest of you keep running in your non-stop marathon to the rainbow."

On Time:

"The passing of time usually dulls the memories of our saddest moments..."

On Which Way to Go:

"...when one's avenue of retreat is cut off there is only one way to go--forward."

On New Books:

"A new book is very much like a child. Sooner or later it must go out into the world and succeed or fail on its own, leaving behind one or two loving people filled with concern and guilt and wondering if they had truly done all they could to prepare their issue for the cruel marketplace of life."

On Christopher:

"...the word Christopher means Christ-bearer."

On Road of Life:

"...all of us...start out on this uncertain road of life with a dream, an ambition, a goal. A fortunate few manage to survive all the hazards, roadblocks, and potholes along the way to reach their objectives. Most of us, however, get sidetracked on our journey and stumble through our alloted years with our hopes and dreams eventually fading from our memory."

On Legacy:

"I am convinced that the greatest legacy we can leave our children are happy memories: those precious moments so much like pebbles on the beach that are plucked from the white sand and placed in tiny boxes that lay undisturbed on tall shelves until one day they spill out and time repeats itself, with joy and sweet sadness, in the child now an adult."

On Vanity:

"Vanity is an almost incurable disease..."

On Human Race:

I don't know if the human race is worth saving, and fortunately, I don't have to make that decision."

On Man:

"Man is the only animal that blushes and laughs, and yet this creature, who can be so tender and loving , is the only living thing that constantly preyson its own species."

On Failure:

"Those who live in unhappy failure have never exercised their options for the better things of life because they have never been aware that they had any choices!"

On Work:

"So any of us count the hours of work as slavery."

--Og Mandino