“I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving, caring souls. How many people can say that?”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Dying," Morrie suddenly said, "is the only one thing to be sad over, Mitch.
Living unhappily is something else.
So many of the people who come to visit me are unhappy.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“I used to think I knew everything. I was a "smart person" who "got things done," and because of that, the higher I climbed, the more I could look down and scoff at what seemed silly or simple, even religion.
But I realized something as I drove home that night: that I am neither better nor smarter, only luckier. And I should be ashamed of thinking I knew everything, because you can know 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.”
Source: Have a Little Faith: A True Story
“..I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died.. which I figured was my natural fate.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day.”
Source: For One More Day
“And on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small group of friends and family for a 'living funeral'. Each of them spoke and paid tribute.. Some cried. Some laughed. One woman read a poem:
'My dear and loving cousin..
Your ageless heart
as you ,love through time, layer on layer,
tender sequoia..'
.. And all the heartfelt things we never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Had it not been for "Nightline," Morrie would have died without ever seeing me again. I had no good excuse for this, except the one that everyone these days seems to have.
I had become too wrapped up in the siren song of my life. I was busy.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Is this what comes at the end, I wondered?
Maybe death is the great equaliser, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.”
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“That's what we're all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing." Which is? "Make peace with living.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“It's natural to die," he said again. "The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don't see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we're human we're something above nature."
He smiled at the plant.
"We're not. Everything that gets born, dies.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“.. when all this started, I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?' I decided I'm going to live - or at least try to live - the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humour, with composure.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“His eyes were more sunken than I remembered them, and his cheekbones more pronounced. This gave him a harsher, older look - until he smiled, of course, and the sagging cheeks gathered up like curtains.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“What a waste.. All those people saying all those wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“..And because he was still able to move his hands - Morrie always spoke with both hands waving - he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I'm so angry and bitter. But it doesn't last too long. Then I get up and say, 'I want to live..'
'So far, I've been able to do it. Will I be able to continue? I don't know. But I'm betting on myself I will.'
Koppel seemed extremely taken with Morrie. He asked about the humility that death induced.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“I'm on the last great journey here--and people want me to tell them what to pack.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“And on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small group of friends and family for a 'living funeral'. Each of them spoke and paid tribute.. Some cried. Some laughed. One woman read a poem:
'My dear and loving cousin..
Your ageless heart
as you move through time, layer on layer,
tender sequoia..'
.. And all the heartfelt things we never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?..
He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Holding him like that moved me in a way I cannot describe, except to say I felt the seeds of death inside his shrivelling frame, and as I laid him in his chair, adjusting his head on the pillows, I had the coldest realisation that our time was running out.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“If some mystical clarity of thought came when you looked death in the eye, then I knew Morrie wanted to share it. And I wanted to remember it for as long as I could.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“It's never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“How long have i been dead?
A minute. An hour. A thousand years”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?
"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.
"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
"It is why we are drawn to babies . . ." He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“There was no one she wanted to see more. There was no one she wanted to see less.
"Why?" she whispered. "Why are you here?"
"The winds blew," he said.”
Source: The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
“The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.”
“Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Love each other or die.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
