Great Throughts Treasury

"Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Daxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions are spent purchasing them. You don't even need a specific trauma, just 'general depression' is enough, or anxiety, as if sadness is as treatable as the common cold."

"Have you ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine?"

"He almost told her everything right then, that very moment. But you grab a moment, or you let it pass. He let it pass."

"He could not feel agony. He could not feel sadness. His consciousness felt smoky, wisplike, incapable of anything but calm."

"He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a very valuable lesson: that holding on to things will only break your heart."

"He did not know that the child who had asked for yesterday was now seeking to own tomorrow."

"He didn't understand depression. To him it was weakness."

"He explained how once we began to chime the hour, we lost the ability to be satisfied. There was always a quest for more minutes, more hours, faster progress to accomplish more in each day. The simple joy of living between sunrises was gone."

"He had his time measures and he had her. That was his life. For as long as he could remember, it had been that way, Dor and Alli, even as children. I do not want to die, she whispered. You will not die. I want to be with you. You are."

"He mentioned a dear friend Morrie had, Maurie Stein, who had first sent Morrie's aphorisms to the Boston Globe. They had been together at Brandeis since the early sixties. Now Stein was going deaf. Koppel imagined the two men together one day, one unable to speak, the other unable to hear. What would that be like? We will hold hands, Morrie said. And there'll be a lot of love passing between us. Ted, we've had thirty-five years of friendship. You don't need speech or hearing to feel that."

"He never spoke of that night again, not to your mother, not to anyone else. He was ashamed for her, for Mickey, for himself. In the hospital, he stopped speaking altogether. Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge. His thoughts still haunted him.'"

"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."

"He tells my parents how I took every class he taught. He tells them, You have a special boy here. Embarrassed, I look at my feet. Before we leave, I hand my professor a present, a tan briefcase with his initials on the front. I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn?t want to forget him. Maybe I didn?t want him to forget me. Mitch, you are one of the good ones, he says, admiring the briefcase. Then he hugs me. I feel his thin arms around my back. I am taller than he is, and when he holds me, I feel awkward, older, as if I were the parent and he were the child.He asks if I will stay in touch, and without hesitation I say, Of course. When he steps back, I see that he is crying."

"He thought about his son?s stone flying across the yard, the youthful idea that you could toss away the future if you didn?t like it?and he realized, suddenly, what he needed to do."

"He was doing what a man does when left with nothing. He was telling himself his own life story."

"He was near tears, 'Who do I blame?' he kept asking me. 'There is no God. I can only blame myself.' The Reb's face tightened, as if in pain. That, he said, softly, is a terrible self-indictment. Worse than an unanswered prayer? Oh yes. It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody's out there."

"He wondered how it was fair that your dying should depend so much on when you were born."

"He wrote bite-sized philosophies about living with death's shadow: Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do; Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it; Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others; Don't assume that it's too late to get involved."

"Heaven is always and forever around us, and no soul remembered is ever really gone."

"Hello, Edward. I've been waiting for you."

"Her death was as insignificant as her life."

"Her divorced friends had made a pact not to leave each other alone on nights when loneliness had extra strength."

"Her initial elation had given way to something unexpected: a heightened sadness. Even depression."

"His body had been weakened, the ocean had left him vulnerable, pneumonia took ahold of him, and in time, he died.' Because of Mickey?' Eddie said. Because of loyalty,' she said. People don't die because of loyalty.' They don't?' She smiled. 'Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?... Better... to be loyal to one another.'"

"His father, who for years had refused to speak to Eddie, now lacked the strength to even try. He watched his son with heavy-lidded eyes. Eddie, after struggling to find even one sentence to say, did the only thing he could think of to do: He held up his hands and showed his father his grease-stained fingertips."

"His plans never worked out. In time, he found himself graying and wearing looser pants and in a state of weary acceptance, that this was who he was and who he would always be, a man with sand in his shoes in a world of mechanical laughter"

"His running was over. His dancing was over. Worse, for some reason, the way he used to feel about things was over, too. He withdrew. Things seemed silly or pointless."

"Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside."

"How can he explain such sadness when she is supposed to make him happy? The truth is he cannot explain it himself. All he knows is that something stepped in front of him, blocking his way, until in time he gave up on things, he gave up studying engineering and he gave up on the idea of traveling. He sat down in his life. And there he remained."

"How can I be envious of where you are when I've been there myself?"

"How could he find perfection in such an average day? Then I realized this was the whole point."

"How do you let go of anger? How do you release a fury you?ve been standing on for so long, you would stumble if it were yanked away? As Sully sat in his old room, holding the letter, he felt himself lifting off from his bitterness, the way one lifts off in a dream. Elliot Gray, an enemy for so long, was now seen differently, a man forgivable for his mistake."

"I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you?ll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn?t."

"I am every age, up to my own."

"I am in love with Hope."

"I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother's death-notice telegram or by his father's corpse in the city morgue."

"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 believe that you live on inside the hearts and minds of everyone you've touched while you were here on earth."

"I believe the biggest themes of life are put into the best focus when held up against the very sharp light of mortality."

"I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died."

"I didn't want to forget him. Maybe I didn't want him to forget me."

"I don?t allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each morning, a few tears, and that?s all? It?s horrible to watch my body slowly wilt away to nothing. But it?s also wonderful because of all the time I get to say goodbye."

"I don?t know about Heaven or Hell, but I do know that we are visited all the time by the spirits of those who affected us in life."

"I don?t want to leave the world in a state of fright. I want to know what?s happening, accept it, get to a peaceful place, and let go."

"I don't know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory."

"I don't mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don't go around naked, for example. I don't run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big things- how we think, what we value- those you must choose yourself. You can't let anyone-or any society- determine those for you."

"I don't want to fight, she whispered. Just come home."

"I don't want to leave the world in a state of fright. I want to know what's happening, accept it, get to a peaceful place, and let go."

"I feel ashamed now that I tried to take my life. It is such a precious thing. I had no one to talk me out of my despair and that was a mistake. You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart."

"I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, ?Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read??"