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 "Soul Moments"

In “Soul Moments”, Phil Cousineau presents a terrific collection of synchronicity stories which fed my longing for heartwarming stories of meaningful coincidences in May 2002, during a brief three-month interlude in my professional career. Here are the lessons I learned:

On “Synchronicity”:

“…synchronicity is less a phenomenon to be proved than a fascination to be lived.”

* * *

“For me, synchronicity is an inexplicable but profoundly meaningful coincidence that stirs the soul and offers a guiding glimpse of one’s destiny.”

* * *

“For all its usual brevity, an experience of synchronicity is marked by elegance, symmetry, vividness, suddenness, poetry, or a truth that speaks to the heart, often finally a sense of the unforgettable…”

* * *

“…there are no accidents in the circle of synchronicity.”

* * *

“…synchronicities arose during points of crisis in people’s lives, and moreover, contained insights, seeds of the future, and signs of destiny, if only people learned how to read them.”

* * *

“…an experience of synchronicity is a soul moment, an electrifying experience, as sudden as a visitation by a god, a palpable inrush of grace and power, one of the defining moments in life, a sudden conviction that we might move beyond fate and realize a hint of our destiny.”

* * *

“There is a palpable link between synchronicity and destiny.”

On “Moments”:

“I know I couldn’t make it through the rest of the day if every moment had momentous significance.”

On “Meaning of Life”:

“…the meaning of life is not only in the quest for one’s own well-being but lies in the service of something greater.”

On “Life’s Stories”:

“…there are only six kinds of stories that are repeated over and over…”


On “True Vocation”:

“…if one does the work proper to one’s true vocation, ‘the grace of great things’ will come naturally.”

- Phil Cousineau