Mitch Albom Quotes

Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is".

We’re so wrapped up with 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?

When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.

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.

But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.

The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

I made the wrong choice ," I whispered. My mother shook her head. "A child should never have to choose.

Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

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.

We don't see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.

You can feel 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.

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.

Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.

In business people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own.

That kind of love - the kind you realize you already have by the life you've created together - that's the kind that lasts.

once we began to chime the hour, we lost the ability to be satisfied

We all know how to be a child. It's inside all of us. For me, it's just remembering how to enjoy it.

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

And I suppose tapes are a desperate attempt to steal something from Death's suitcase.

You are not your past.

There are two stories for every life; the one you live & the one others tell

I took my orders, too. But if i couldn't keep you alive, I thought I could at least keep you together. In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.

She felt worthless and hollow. There was no hope of fixing this. And when hope is gone, time is punishment.

There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

There's a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need," Morrie said. "You need food, you want a chocolate sundae. You have to be honest with yourself. You don't need the latest sports car, you don't need the biggest house. The truth is, you don't get satisfaction from those things. You know what really gives you satisfaction?...Offering others what you have to give...I don't mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling. It's not so hard.

Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed 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.

My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce.

He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things "will only break your heart.

The truth is, when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads -none of us ever got enough of that. We all yearn in some way to return to those days when we were completely taken care of - unconditional love, unconditional attention. Most of us didn't get enough.

I often find that I rock back and forth with a beat in my head constantly. If i stop rocking, it usually means I've hit a snag in my writing.

I think we've created a system here where only the lifelong politicians, who are used to this kind of life in the spotlight and don't care, or people who have egos along the lines of Donald Trump - who just don't care what people say about them - they're the only people who are ever going to run because nobody wants their life dissected as meanly and as randomly as our media has come to do with anybody who runs for office.

You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship

The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.

It's the same thing with faith, by the way." We don't want to get stuck having to go to services all the time, or having to follow all the rules. We don't want to commit to God. We'll take Him when we need Him, or when things are going good. But real commitment? That requires staying power‎-‎-‎-in faith and in marriage." And if you don't commit? I asked. "Your choice. But you miss what's on the other side." What's on the other side? "Ah." He smiled, "A happiness you cannot find alone.

Once, lovers on faraway shores sat by candlelight and dipped ink to parchment, writing words that could not be erased. They took an evening to compose their thoughts, maybe the next evening as well.

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.

But they wanted you. Time is not something you give back. The very next moment may be answer to your prayer. To deny that is to deny the most important part of the future.

To these people, unhappiness was a condition, an intolerable state of affairs. If pills could help, pills were taken. But pills were not going to change the fundamental problem in the construction. Wanting what you can´t have. Looking for self-worth in the mirror. Layering work on top of work and still wondering why you weren´t satisfied - before working some more.

When hope is gone, time is punishment.

If we knew what comes next, we never would have worried.

My father moved through theys of we, singing each new leaf out of each tree, (and every child was sure that spring danced when she heard my father sing).

No matter how smart she appeared, she was fragile at her core.

I am in love with Hope.

When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.

He was near tears, 'Who do I blame?' he kept asking me. 'There is no God.I can only blame myself.'" The Reb's face tightened, as if in pain. "That," he said, softly, "is a terrible self-indictment." Worse than an unanswered prayer? "Oh yes. It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody's out there.

When you look into your mother’s eyes, you know that is the purest love you can find on this earth.

Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?