The Five People You Meet in Heaven
by Mitch Albom.
- Page 9: Every life has one true-love snapshot. Fore Eddie, it came on a warm September night after a thunderstorm, when the boardwalk was spongy with water. She wore a yellow cotton dress, with a pink barrette in her hair. Eddie dint’ say much. He was so nervous he felt as if his tongue were glued to his teeth. They danced to the music of a big band, Long legs Delaney and his Everglades Orchestra. He bought her a lemon fizz. She said she had to go before her parents got angry. But as she walked away, she turned and waved. That was the snapshot. For the rest of his life, whenever he thought of Marguerite, Eddie would see that moment, her waving over her shoulder, her dark hair falling over one eye, and he would feel the same arterial burst of love.
- Person 1: The Blue Man
- Page 32: He had barely known this man. Why was he seeing him now? He was like one of those faces that pops into your dreams and the next morning you say, “you’ll never guess who I dreamed about last night.”
- Page 48: 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.
- Page 50: No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.
- Person 2: Captain
- Page 66: You still juggle?
- Page 79: “You don’t have to ask me to wait,” Marguerite says suddenly. “I don’t?” She shakes her head. Eddie smiles. Saved from a question that has caught in his throat all night, he feels as if a string has just shot from his heart and looped around her shoulders, pulling her close, making her his. He loves her more in this moment than he thought he could ever love anyone. She smiles but then her face droops and she blinks back water, although Eddie cannot tell if it is raindrops or tears. “Don’t get killed, OK?”, she says.
- Page 86: The Captain blew smoke, then motioned with the end of the cigarette toward Eddie’s leg. “Because I was the one,” he said, “who shot you.”
- Page 93: Sacrifice. You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little Sacrifices. Big Sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.
- Person 3: Dad/Ruby
- Page 110: All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beyond death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicable, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done.
- Page 122: Emile’s spirit was as broken as his body. It took three years before he could walk on his own. We moved away, to a place outside the city, a small flat, where our lives were spent modestly, me tending to my wounded husband and silently nurturing a single wish – That he had never built that place.
- Page 126: Parents rarely let go f their chidlren, 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.
- Page 141: 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.
- Person 4: Marguerite
- Page 166: Marguerite said something about the bikini bathing suits the young girls were wearing and how she would never have the nerve to wear such a thing. Edie said the girls were lucky, because if she did the men would not look at anyone else. And even though by this point Marguerite was in her mid-40s and her hips had thickened and a web of small lines had formed around her eyes, she thanked Eddie gratefully and looked at his crooked nose and wide jaw. The waters of their love fell again from above and soaked them as surely as the sea that gathered at their feet.
- Page 173: Life has to end. Love doesn’t.
- Person 5: Tala
- Page 191: I was sad because I didn’t do anything with my life. I was nothing. I accomplished nothing. I was lost. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.
- “You make rides safe.”
Heaven?
.
