The Five People You Meet in HeavenLast summer this book was read to the staff at
Glen Mhor for a staff bible study/devo. And so I picked it up to read it at home, because everyone had to miss some of it at one point or another (scheduling conflicts). I lent it out, and just recently got it back. And I'm going to post some quotes.
"But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."
"Every life has one true-love snapshot."
"No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river."
"Where.. is my worry? Where is my pain?"
"Your voice will come. We all go through the same thing. You cannot talk when you first arrive" He smiled. "It helps you listen."
"There are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more seperate one life from another than you can seperate a breeze from the wind."
The Blue Man helod out his hand. "Fairness," he said, "does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."
"Strangers," the Blue man said, "are just family you have yet to come to know."
"Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to."
"You didn't get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to. Little sacrifices, big sacrifices."
"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."
"Eddie slumped in the rushing water. The stones of his stories were all around him now, beneath the surface, one touching another. He could feel his form melting, dissolving, and he sensed that he did not have long, that whatever came after the five people you meet in heaven, it was upon him now."
"The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."