Mitch Albom

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.

In the stories about life and death, the soul often floats above the goodbye moment, hovering over police cars at highway accidents, or clinging like a spider to hospital room ceilings. These are people who receive a second chance, who somehow, for some reason, resume their place in the world. Eddie, it appeared, was not getting a second chance.

"If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it."

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

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

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

"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."

Do the kind of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be satisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back.

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.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

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

"Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too - even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling."