"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."

"Tell me about your family," I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way."

"Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?.. He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying."

"Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others."

"The little things, I can obey. 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."

"Kids chase the love that eludes them."

"Why did you measure the days and nights? To know. Sitting high above the city, Father Time realized that knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing."

"You have one family, Charley. For good or bad. You have one family. You can't trade them in. You can't lie to them. You can't run two at once, substituting back and forth."Sticking with your family is what makes it a family."

"Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He could have stayed in that moment forever."

"Memories are not in places, Papa. Memories are in your mind. They're here, too."

"We all lose somebody we care about and want to find some comforting way of dealing with it, something that will give us a little closure, a little peace."

"The eighties happened. The nineties happened. Death and sickness and getting fat and going bald happened. I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it."

"There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like."

"We all have same beginning (BIRTH), and we will have same ending (DEATH). So how different can we be?"

"She put one hand on mine. "When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times."

"Rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. He would close his eyes and with a blissful smile begin to move to his own sense of rhythm. It wasn't always pretty."

"It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it."

"The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate.. headed for New York City, ready to offer the world his talent. The world, I discovered, was not all that interested. I wandered around my early twenties, paying rent and reading classifieds and wondering why the lights were not turning green for me."

"He was pitching to me before I could walk. He gave me wooden bat before my mother let me use scissors. He said I could make the major leagues one day if I had "a plan," and if I "stuck to the plan"Of course, when you're that young, you nest in your parents' plans, not your own."

"Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe."

"It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody's out there."

"We are, as we die, who we most were in life..."

"I was astonished by his complete lack of self-pity. Morrie, who could no longer dance, swim, bathe, or walk; Morrie, who could no longer answer his own door, dry himself after a shower, or even roll over in bed. How could he be so accepting? I watched him struggle with a fork, picking at a piece of tomato, missing it the first two times - a pathetic scene, and yet I could not deny that sitting in his presence was almost magically serene, the same calm breeze that soothed me back in college."

"In the South American rainforest, there is a tribe called the Desana, who see the world as a fixed quantity of energy that flows between all creatures. Every birth must therefore engender a death, and every death brings forth another birth. This way, the energy of the world remains complete.When they hunt for food, the Desana know the animals they kill will leave a hole in the spiritual well. But that hole will be filled, they believe, by the Desana hunters when they die. Were there no men dying, there would be no birds or fish being born. I like this idea. Morrie likes it, too. The closer he gets to goodbye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest. What we take, we must replenish."It's only fair," he says."

"Ted," he said, "when all this started, I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?" I decided I'm going to live-or at least try to live-the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure."

"Belief, hard work, love - you have those things, you can do anything."

"As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her."

"But everyone knows someone who has died, I said. Why is it so hard to think about dying?'Because,' Morrie continued, 'most of us 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.'And facing death changes all that?'Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.'He sighed. 'Learn how to die, and you learn how to live."

"I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry."

"What is false about hope?"

"That was the end of his driving.. That was the end of his walking free.. That was the end of his privacy.. And that was the end of his secret."

"Be compassionate ... and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be a better place."

"He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems - the way they had always.. because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener."

"You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back."

"Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas."

"Lost love is still love, Eddie. It just takes a different form, that's all. You can't hold their hand... You can't tousle their hair... But when those senses weaken another one comes to life... Memory... Memory becomes your partner. You hold it... you dance with it... Life has to end, Eddie... Love doesn't."

"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."

"At a certain point, your life is more about your legacy to your kids than anything else."

"One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus what I want for myself."

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

"Fear is how you lose your life...a little bit at a time...What we give to fear, we take away from...faith."

"And on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small group of friends and family for a 'living funeral'. Each of them spoke and paid tribute.. Some cried. Some laughed. One woman read a poem: 'My dear and loving cousin.. Your ageless heart as you ,love through time, layer on layer, tender sequoia..' .. And all the heartfelt things we never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day."

"A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wife's, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth.As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared south, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky."

"Loneliness was like an ogre hovering over those activities."

"It's the same thing with faith, by the way." We don't want to get stuck having to go to services all the time, or having to follow all the rules. We don't want to commit to God. We'll take Him when we need Him, or when things are going good. But real commitment? That requires staying power---in faith and in marriage."And if you don't commit? I asked."Your choice. But you miss what's on the other side."What's on the other side?"Ah." He smiled, "A happiness you cannot find alone."

"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."

"Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. It's not so much, what's the point? It's more like, what's the difference?"

"Every family is a ghost story."

"War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget."

"The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It's as if we are screaming Notice Me! Remember Me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten."