The Five People You Meet in Heaven Quotes

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

“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.”

“Time is not what you think. Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on Earth is only the beginning.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a 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.”

“Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.”

“Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.”

“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.”

“That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.”

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

“No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

“Things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well.”

“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.”

“Every life has one true love snapshot.”

“Everyone has an idea of heaven, as do most religions, and they should all be respected. The version represented here is only a guess, a wish, in some ways, that my uncle and others like him - people who felt unimportant here on Earth- realize, finally, how much they mattered and how they were loved.”

“It’s fixed.”

“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.”

“People think of Heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.”

“You have peace when you make it with yourself.”

“For the rest of his life, whenever he thought of Marguerite, Eddie would see that moment, her waving over her shoulder, her dark hair falling over one eye, and he would feel the same arterial burst of love.”

“Sacrifice, you made one. I made one. We all make them. But you are angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost . . . You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life.”

“Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. 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.”

“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.”

“Life has to end. Love doesn’t.”