“In the South American rainforest, there is a tribe called the Desana, who see the world as a fixed quantity of energy that flows between all creatures. Every birth must therefore engender a death, and every death brings forth another birth. This way, the energy of the world remains complete.
When they hunt for food, the Desana know the animals they kill will leave a hole in the spiritual well. But that hole will be filled, they believe, by the Desana hunters when they die. Were there no men dying, there would be no birds or fish being born. I like this idea. Morrie likes it, too. The closer he gets to goodbye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest. What we take, we must replenish.
"It's only fair," he says.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“The problem is that we don't believe that we are much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Say I was divorced, or living alone, or had no children. This disease—what I’m going
through—would be so much harder. I’m not sure I could do it. Sure, people would come
visit, friends, associates, but it’s not the same as having someone who will not leave. It’s
not the same as having someone whom you know has an eye on you, is watching you
the whole time.
“This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s
someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother
died—what I call your ‘spiritual security’—knowing that your family will be there watching
out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.”
He shot me a look.
“Not work,” he added”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Maybe that's worse, not letting ourselves be loved. Because we're too afraid of giving ourselves to someone we might lose.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“You see," he says to the girl, "you closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them too - even when you're in the dark. Even when you are falling.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Those who sat with him saw his eyes go moist when they spoke about something horrible, or crinkle in delight when they told him a really bad joke. He was always ready to openly display the emotion so often missing from my baby boomer generation. We are great at small talk: 'What do you do?' 'Where do you live?' But really listening to someone -- without trying to sell them something, pick them up, recruit them, or get some kind of status in return -- how often do we get this anymore?”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“اگر چه گونه مردن را یاد بگیری ، چه گونه زیستن را نیز فرا خواهی گرفت.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“But everyone knows someone who has died, I said.
Why is it so hard to think about dying?
'Because,' Morrie continued, 'most of us walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.'
And facing death changes all that?
'Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.'
He sighed. 'Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“He tells my parents how I took every class he taught. He tells them, “You have a special boy here.” Embarrassed, I look at my feet. Before we leave, I hand my professor a present, a tan briefcase with his initials on the front. I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn’t want to forget him. Maybe I didn’t want him to forget me.
“Mitch, you are one of the good ones,” he says, admiring the briefcase. Then he hugs me. I feel his thin arms around my back. I am taller than he is, and when he holds me, I feel awkward, older, as if I were the parent and he were the child.
He asks if I will stay in touch, and without hesitation I say, “Of course.” When he steps back, I see that he is crying.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Through it all, despite it all, Eddie privately adored his old man, because sons will adore their fathers even through 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.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“There is a reason you glance up when you first hear a melody, or tap your foot to the sound of a drum. All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?”
Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“That is often why you come to music, isn't it? To feel that you are not alone?”
Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“I drive a beat-up Mercury Cougar, with the windows down and the music up. I seek my identity in toughness - but it is Morrie's softness that draws me, and because he doesn't look at me as a kid trying to be something more than I am, I relax.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“This, by the way, is hardly the first time one of your has discouraged one of min. If I possessed a metal link for every tongue-clucking human who said a child was too young, the instrument too large, or the very idea of pursuing music was "a waste of time," I could wrap your world in chains. Disapproving parents, dismissive record executives, vindictive critics. sometimes I think the greatest talents of all is perserverance.”
Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“Music tells the truths”
Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“El Maestro: Do not attack the strings, Francisco.
Francisco Presto: No, Maestro.
El Maestro: Coax them.
Francisco Presto: Yes, Maestro.
El Maestro: Make them hunger for your next note. Same as in life.
Francisco Presto: In life, Maestro?
El Maestro: When you want someone to listen to you, will you attack them?
Francisco Presto: No, Maestro.
El Maestro: No, you will not. you will make them hear the beauty of what you are offering, and they will want it for themselves.”
Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“Luke the Drifter: Play me the saddest song you got.
Frankie Presto: Why do you want to hear a sad song?
Luke the Drifter: They’re more true than the happy ones”
Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“Learn this from me. 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.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“This is your house, Reb. You are in the rafters, the floorboards, the walls, the lights. You are in every echo through every hallway. We hear you now. I hear you still.”
“There was a reason to it all,' she said.
'What reason?' he said. 'How could there be a reason? You died. You were forty-seven. You were the best person any of us knew, and you died and lost everything. And I lost everything. I lost the only woman I ever loved.'
She took his hands. 'No, you didn't. I was right here. And you loved me anyway.
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,' she said. 'Love doesn't.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“A funeral is no place for secrets.”
Source: For One More Day
“I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don't say anything because we're frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Time flies with you”
Source: The Time Keeper
“But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.”
Source: For One More Day
“This is the disarming power of children: their need makes you forget your own.”
Source: The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
“Nurses came to his house to work with Morrie's withering legs.. bending them back and forth as if pumping water from a well..
He met with meditation teachers, and closed his eyes and narrowed his thoughts until his world shrunk down to a single breath, in and out, in and out.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“What you’re thinking about can be what you become.”
Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“What we carry defines who we are and the effort we make is our legacy.”
Source: Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
“We adults can be a wretched lot Chika, yet in every child's face we see the Lord has not given up on us.”
Source: Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
“ALL PARENTS DAMAGE their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“However, this is too harmonious, grand, and overwhelming a universe to believe it all on accident.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“O amor perdido não deixa de ser amor. Apenas assume uma forma diferente. Não conseguimos ver o sorriso da pessoa amada, ou levar-lhe comida, ou mexer-lhe nos cabelos, ou rodopiar com ela numa pista de dança. Mas quando esses sentimentos enfraquecem, há outro que se sublime. A memória. A memória torna-se nossa companheira. Alimenta-nos. A vida tem um fim. Mas o Amor não.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“Lost love is still love. It takes a different form.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“Life is a series of pulls back and forth... A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. Most of us live somewhere in the middle. A wrestling match...Which side wins? Love wins. Love always wins.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“some things you endure for a reason”
Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“He looked at his own arms and realized, in his earthly body, he was now older than his father. He had outlived him in every way.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“When the news came that his father had died—"slipped away," a nurse told him, as if he had gone out for milk—Eddie felt the emptiest kind of anger, the kind that circles in its cage. Like most workingmen's sons, Eddie had envisioned for his father a heroic death to counter the commonness of his life.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“By this point—already a strapping young teenager—Eddie only nodded back. Unbeknownst to him, he had begun the ritual of semaphore with his father, forsaking words or physical affection. It was all to be done internally. You were just supposed to know it, that's all. Denial of affection. The damage done.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't.
But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.”
Source: For One More Day
“Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"
Rose chuckled.
"But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.”
Source: For One More Day
“It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch,” he finally whispered. We also need to forgive ourselves.”
Ourselves?
“Yes. 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. That doesn’t help you when you get to where I am.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Mitch," he said, "the culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up in egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks - we're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“As my visits with Morrie go on, I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that hold it -so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.
Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all.
That is what they believe.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Tell you what. After I'm dead, you talk. And I'll listen.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.”
Source: For One More Day
“I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone—or any society determine those for you.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”
“You bet,” Morrie whispered.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
His voice dropped to a whisper. "Let it come in. We think we don't deserve love, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, 'Love is the only rational act.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
