Great Throughts Treasury

"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 heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it? Life has to end. Love doesn?t."

"Lost love is still love."

"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."

"Love does not make you a fool."

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

"Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone."

"Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish."

"Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own."

"Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with 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."

"Love or Perish."

"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."

"Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures: A fear of time running out."

"Man wants to own his existence. But no one owns time."

"Mankind is connected in ways it does not understand - even in dreams."

"Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it."

"Miracles happen quietly every day - in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a road side stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score."

"Mitch, if you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone."

"Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have."

"Morrie talked about his most fearful moments, when he felt his chest locked in heaving surges or when he wasn't sure where his next breath would come from. These horrifying times, he said, and his first emotions were horror, fear, anxiety. But once he recognized the feel of those emotions, their texture, their moisture, the shiver down the back, the quick flash of heat that crosses your brain - then he was able to say, Okay,. This is fear. Step away from it. Step away."

"Morrie was looking at life from some very different place than anyone else I knew. A healthier place. A more sensible place. And he was about to die."

"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.?"

"Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do."

"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."

"Much more fun to feel that God does not listen to you and says, rather than feel nothing anyone listen to you."

"Much of what we called depression was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures we weren't willing to work for."

"My father moved through ?theys? of we, singing each new leaf out of each tree, (and every child was sure that spring danced when she heard my father sing)."

"My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce."

"My own father didn?t talk a lot about feelings or emotions."

"Napoleon once dismissed religion as 'what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.' Meaning, without the fear of God--or literally the hell we might have to pay--the rest of us would just take what we wanted."

"Neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have."

"Never tell a child that something it?s too hard."

"No love is worth that trouble."

"No matter how smart she appeared, she was fragile at her core."

"No matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don't see what we could be."

"No one gets left behind, remember?"

"No soul remembered is ever really gone."

"No story sits by itself, Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river."

"No, Edward. You are here so I can teach you something. All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you."

"No. You can't work your way into heaven. Anytime you try and justify yourself with works, you disqualify yourself with works. What I do here, every day, for the rest of my life, is only my way of saying, 'Lord, regardless of what eternity holds for me, let me give something back to you. I know it doesn't even no scorecard. But let me make something of my life before I go.. and then, Lord, I'm at your mercy."

"Nobody?s favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody?s favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books?"

"None of us can undo what we've done, or relive a life already recorded. But... there is no such thing as too late in life."

"Not aging is not the same as living, and without human contact, his soul dried up."

"Not aging is not the same as living."

"Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say."

"Now that child he said reminds me something our sages thought. When a baby comes into the world, his hands are clenched right? Like this? He made a fist. Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything to say, 'The whole world is mine.' But when an old person dies, how does he do so? with his hands open. why? because he has learned the lesson. What lesson? I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. We can take nothing with us."

"Now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted."

"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."

"On earth, Marguerite said, when you fell asleep, you sometimes dreamed your heaven and those dreams helped to form it. But there was no reason for such dreams now."

"Once heaven is done with grandma, we'd like her back, thanks."

"Once we began to chime the hour, we lost the ability to be satisfied."