Mitch Albom - The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

45 Sourced Quotes

View all Mitch Albom Quotes
Fairness doesn't govern life and death. If it did, no good man would ever die young.

Mitch Albom
Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily... and the other ends badly.

Mitch Albom
You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself.

Mitch Albom
War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.

Mitch Albom
When your time came, it came, and that was that. You might say something smart on your way out, but you might just as easily say something stupid.

Mitch Albom
"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

Mitch Albom
Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.

Mitch Albom
People say they 'find' love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. And [he] found a certain love with [her], a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable.

Mitch Albom
Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.

Mitch Albom
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.

Mitch Albom
The manager once called me the 'best freak' in his stable, and, sad as it sounds, I took pride in that. When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.

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

Mitch Albom
It is because the spirit knows deep down that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else. And in that small distance, lives are changed.

Mitch Albom
This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.

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

Mitch Albom
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.

Mitch Albom
The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate who left campus that day headed for New York city, ready to offer the world his talent. The world, I discovered. was not all that interested.

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

Mitch Albom
She was like a wound beneath an old bandage, and he had grown more used to the bandage.

Mitch Albom
"Life has to end." Marguerite said. "Love doesn't"

Mitch Albom
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.

Mitch Albom
Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else. Instead, he did what we all do. He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come.

Mitch Albom
Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralysing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.

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

Mitch Albom
It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired maintenance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.

Mitch Albom
"All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you." Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. "What?" he said. "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

Mitch Albom
"Your voice will come. We all go through the same thing. You cannot talk when you first arrive." He smiled. "It helps you listen."

Mitch Albom
Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.

Mitch Albom
Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside.

Mitch Albom
Time," the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat down next to Eddie. "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.

Mitch Albom