"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."


"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."


"Every life has one true-love snapshot."


"Where do you think?
Heaven.
No? It can't be heaven? Why? Because this is where you grew up?
Well. People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps."


"There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and 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.
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."


"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."


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


"Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning."


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


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


"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."


"Ain't you supposed to have peace when you die?
You have peace when you make it with yourself."


"Things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well.
We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us."


"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."


"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."


"Lost love is still love. 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. Love doesn't."


"And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that 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, The five people you meet in heaven


---


To M., who lives to kill that dull routine...