Life lessons from The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

I rarely read novels, but this one was given to me. Small as it is, it is packed with life lessons. So here, I leave few passages.
Simple rules as these can really change the way you view things in life and the way you act in every situation.

"All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time...there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind. [...] Fairness, does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young. [...] 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. [...] But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. [...] Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know. [...] No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone. [...] 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. [...] Sacrifice, you made one. I made one. We all make them... Sacrifice is part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. [...] Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.
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.
You have peace, when you make it with yourself.
Things that happen before you are born still affect you, and people who come before your time affect you as well.
We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time - we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.
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 hearts 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.
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.
Forgive...that's because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it. You need to forgive...
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.
Lost love is still love...Life has to end but love doesn't.
that is how strong lost love can be.
Silence is worse when you know it won't be broken.
...he felt his body being washed from his soul, meat from the bone, and with it went all the pain and weariness he ever held inside him, every scar, every wound, every bad memory... and a peace came upon him that he had never known before.
part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
These were my selected excerpts from The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom.

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