(no subject)
It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.
Every life has one true-love snapshot
Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners
There are no random acts. We are all connected. You can no more seperate one life from another than you can seperate a breeze from the wind.
Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.
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.
Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know
No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.
It's the thinking that gets you killed
In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.
Time is not what you think. Dying? Not the end of everything we think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.
That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.
Sacrifice is a part of life. It's suppoused to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.
Sometimes when you sacrifice something really precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.
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 childhood completely into jagged little pieces beyond repair.
You have peace when you make it with yourself.
We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us.
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.
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.
Oh, Eddie, it never changes. When the groom lifts the veil, when the bride accepts the ring, the possibilities you see in their eyes, it's the same around the world. They truly believe their love and their marriage is going to break all the records.
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.
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are suppoused to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
He ran down the heart of the old midway, where the weight guessers, fortune-tellers, and dancing gypsies had once worked. He lowered his chin and held his arms out like a glider, and every few steps he would jump, the way children do, hoping running will turn to flying. 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
"There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."
Eddie looked confused.
"People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless. This is the greatest gift God can give you;to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for."