"Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin."

"A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers."

"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."

"Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them."

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

"Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out."

"The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family. If you don't have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don't have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish'."

"And a man without memories is just a shell."

"Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven't found meaning in their lives, so they're running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running. Once you start running, it's hard to slow yourself down."

"Time flies with you."

"Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone."

"They teach you, as children, that you might go to heaven. They never teach you that heaven might come to you."

"I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart."

"If you don't have the support and love and caring and connection that you get from a family, you don't have much at all."

"But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin."

"You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five."

"As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on--in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here."

"...But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins."

"You're not a wave, you're a part of the ocean."

"I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know."

"All who are born are always dying."

"In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you're too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own."

"Miracles happen quietly every day-in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a roadside stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score.But now and then, a miracle is declared to the world.And when that happens, things change."

"The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone."

"Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed 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."

"When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness."

"What happened to me? I asked myself. Morris's high, smoky voice took me back to my university years, when I thought rich people were evil, a shirt and tie were prison clothes, and life without freedom to get up and go - motorcycle beneath you, breeze in your face, down the streets of Paris, into the mountains of Tibet - was not a good life at all. What happened to me?"

"When you look into your mother's eyes, you know that is the purest love you can find on this earth."

"You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes."Do they ever make more sense?"No."

"I thought about the days i had handed over to a bottle..the nights i can't remember..the mornings i slept thru..all the time spent running from myself."

"When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even thoseyou love."

"After the funeral, my life changed. I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough. No more playing music at half-empty night clubs. No more writing songs in my apartment, songs that no one would hear."

"A funeral is no place for secrets."

"However, this is too harmonious, grand, and overwhelming a universe to believe it all on accident."

"Morrie, Koppel said, "that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?"You bet, Morrie whispered."

"This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have."

"Had it not been for "Nightline," Morrie would have died without ever seeing me again. I had no good excuse for this, except the one that everyone these days seems to have. I had become too wrapped up in the siren song of my life. I was busy."

"He loved to smile. He avoided anger. He was never haunted by "Why am I here?" He knew why he was here, he said: to give to others, to celebrate God, and to enjoy and honour the world he was put in. His morning prayers began with "Thank you, Lord, for returning my soul to me." When you start that way, the rest of the day is a bonus."

"I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don't allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that's all."

"When he smiles it's as if you'd just told him the first joke on earth."

"Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too---even when you're in the dark. Even when you're falling."

"It's not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It's part of the deal we made."

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

"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."

"I think what you notice most when you haven't been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories."

"Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I'd simply been on a long vacation. ..What happened to me? I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places."

"Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don't see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you're surrounded by people who say 'I want mine now,' you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it."

"She was like a wound beneath an old bandage, and he had grown more used to the bandage."

"There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I'm so angry and bitter. But it doesn't last too long. Then I get up and say, 'I want to live..' 'So far, I've been able to do it. Will I be able to continue? I don't know. But I'm betting on myself I will.' Koppel seemed extremely taken with Morrie. He asked about the humility that death induced."

"I was a workaholic. I never stopped. I lived in fifth gear. I bought cars. I invested in stocks. I made more money than I had ever imagined."