The Five People You Meet in Heaven

All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.

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.

Holding anger is a poison...It eats you from inside...We think that by hating someone we hurt them...But hatred is a curved blade...and the harm we do to others...we also do to ourselves.

Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.

Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.

The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.

There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind...

You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself.

Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.

Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

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.

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.

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.

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. And [he] found a certain love with [her], a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable.

Fairness," he said, 'does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.

In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.

There are five people you meet in heaven. 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. 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.

It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

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

That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays

It is because 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.

Courage is confused with picking up arms and cowardness is confused with laying them down.

That's because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed from it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer feel it.

It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.