Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Mitch Albom. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Mitch Albom
Mitchell David Albom (born May 23, 1958) is an American author, journalist, and musician. His books have sold over 39 million copies worldwide. Having achieved national recognition for sports writing in his early career, he is perhaps best known for the inspirational stories and themes that weave through his books, plays, and films. Albom lives with his wife Janine Sabino in Detroit.
But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.
You can't get stuck on what should have happened. That doesn't help you.
Love- the infatuation kind- 'he's so handsome, she's so beautiful'- that can shrivel. As soon as something goes wrong, that kind of love can fly out the window.
Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
Tuesday had always been our day together. Most of my courses with Morrie were on Tuesday, he had office hours on Tuesdays, and when I wrote my senior thesis... it was on Tuesdays that we sat together.... We're Tuesday people.
Mankind is connected in ways it does not understand -- even in dreams.
You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.
Fairness doesn't govern life and death. If it did, no good man would ever die young.
If you accept that you can die at any time -- then you might not be as ambitious as you are.
Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He could have stayed in that moment forever.
You should be convinced of the authenticity of what you have, but you must also be humble enough to say that we don't know everything. And since we don't know everything, we must accept that another person may believe something else.
The backside of mountain is a fight against human nature, he said. You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.
It's not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It's part of the deal we made.
Detroit is a place where we've had it pretty tough. But there is a generosity here and a well of kindness that goes deep.
I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought u wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mother's girdle and whether she should marry someone else.
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.
Everyone keeps talking about fixing and returning America -- making America great. But yet, nobody ever seems to focus on the fact that you're not going to make any country great if you don't address its children.
What we carry defines who we are and the effort we make is our legacy.
When all this started, I asked myself,
'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?'
I decided I'm going to live -- -or at least try to live -- -the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.
Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.
Mortality means you don't have forever to work things out. You can live your life unexamined but then on the last day you're going to think: 'I've left things a little late.
This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.
It is too late.
The old man shook his head. It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be.
He smiled. There is a plan, Dor.
The word 'commitment' has lost it's meaning. I'm old enough to remember when it used to be positive. A commited person was someone to be admired. He was loyal and steady. Now a commitment is something you avoid. You don't want to tie yourself down.
You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. Yes. Do they ever make more sense? No.
When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those
you love.
I believe the biggest themes of life are put into the best focus when held up against the very sharp light of mortality.
Some of these things I understand, some I do not.
It makes no difference.
The discussions give me an excuse to talk to him, fatherly conversations I cannot have with my father, who would like me to be a lawyer.
I seemed to slip in a time warp when I visited Morrie, and I liked myself better when I was there.
I was cranked to a fifth gear, and everything I did, I did on a deadline.
Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas.
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.
Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all.
Longer Version:
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.
You're not going to get to college -- you're not even going to be qualified, even to go to a community college, if you don't address the basic problem of literacy in America. And there's no reason -- no reason -- for us to have that problem.
I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?' I decided I am going to live -- or at least try to live -- the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.
Heaven is always and forever around us and no soul remembered is ever really gone.
I always look for a rhythm in my writing. A cadence to the sentences. Sometimes I think of pieces I write in a song writing infrastructure -- i.e., a verse, a chorus that I return to, a bridge that's something differenct, a chorus that I return to.
Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.
A heart weighs more when it splits in two; it crashes in the chest like a broken plane.
No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we're alone.
We all lose somebody we care about and want to find some comforting way of dealing with it, something that will give us a little closure, a little peace.
I believe in being fully present.
That means you should be with the person you're with. ...
I am talking to you. I am thinking about you.
I think we hear a lot of talk about college, and we don't hear about early education.
How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?
Because one thing God gave us- and I'm afraid it's at times a little too much- is freewill. Freedom to choose. I believe he gave us everything needed to build a beautiful world, if we choose wisely.
There is a time for hello and a time for good-bye. It's why the act of burying thing seems natural, but the act of digging them up does not.
I give myself a good cry if I need it, but then I concentrate on all good things still in my life.
Longer Version:
I give myself a good cry if I need it.
But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life. On the people who are coming to see me. On the stories I'm going to hear. On you -- if it's Tuesday. Because we're Tuesday people.
She felt worthless and hollow. There was no hope of fixing this. And when hope is gone, time is punishment.
Anger is a poison. It eats us inside. We think when we hate someone we hurt them, but hatred is a curved blade, and the harm we do to others we also do to ourselves.
If the only thing wrong with mosques, Lent, chanting, ?Mecca, confession, or reincarnation is that they're not yours- well maybe the problem is YOU.
I meant no disrespect. It's just that I had always felt that rabbis, priests, pastors, any cleric, really, lived on a plane between mortal ground and heavenly sky. God up there. Us down here. Them in between.
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away.
Longer Version:
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.
Did you feel guilty cursing God -- you, of all people?' 'No,' he said. 'Because even in doing so, I was recognizing there was a greater power than me.' He paused. And that is how I began to heal.
As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away.
You can be a mama's boy, be a daddy's boy, but you can't be both. So you cling to the one you think you might lose.
We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don't satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.
Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.
You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.
What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?
There is no fair in life and death. If it were, no good men would die young.
Mothers support certain illusions about their children, and one of my illusions was that I liked who I was, because she did. When she passed away, so did that idea.
After the Israelites safely crossed the Red Sea, the Egyptians chased after them and were drowned. God's angels wanted to celebrate the enemy's demise. God saw this and grew angry. He said, in essence, 'Stop celebrating. For they are my children,too.
The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others.
Longer Version:
The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
What she mostly wanted, he learned, was the same thing many people want -- someone to notice she was there.
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.
