Other Good Notes

"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."

...don't quite agree with the word "damage" but parents do have huge influence and impact on children.

"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."

"People say they 'find' love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love..."

"Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive."

"Line 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...."

"...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."

Tala

- 5th person Eddie met in Heaven, a kid whom he burnt unknowningly in a war in Philippines, made Eddie eventually realize his worth of working as a maintenance man at the Ruby Pier amusement park.

"Children, You keep them safe. You make good for me."

Marguerite

- 4th person Eddie met in Heaven, his wife who died more than 30 years before him, said:

"Lost love is still love, Eddie. 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 hieghtens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. you nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it."

"Life has to end, Love doesn't."

Ruby

- 3rd person Eddie met in Heaven, who used to own the amusement park which Eddie and his dad worked in, said:

"Things that happen before you are born still affect you, And people who come before your time affect you as well."

"Better, to be loyal to one another."

"Learn this from me. 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."

"Forgive, Edward. Forgive. Do you remember the lightness you felt when you first arrived in heaven?" "That's because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it." "You need to forgive..."

The Captain

- 2nd person Eddie met in Heaven who was his leader in army, said:

"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..."

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

"I shot you, all right, and you lost something, but you gained something as well. You just don't know it yet. I gained something, too."

The Blue Man

- 1st person Eddie met in Heaven whom he didn't know when he was alive, said:

"All people you meet here have one thing to teach you."

"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."

"Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."

"My funeral. Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?" "It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

"...during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole." "It is why we are drawn to babies.. And to funerals."

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

Books

calm one's mind...

Bought a few books 3 weeks back, one of them The Five People You Meet In Heaven, by Mitch Albom. Still in the midst of it, but there are good notes that I'd like to share..