Mitch Albom

"Without love, we are birds with broken wings."

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

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

"One withers, another grows."

"Fairness doesn't govern life and death. If it did, no good man would ever die young."

"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."

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.

"If we can remember the feeling of love we once had, we can die without ever going away."

"Don't hang on too long, but don't let go too soon."

Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: Five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for. 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.

"Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?"

How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?