tuesdays
Here is my list of quotes from the book Tuesday’s with Morrie that I felt compelled to pick out.
“For all the time we’d spent together, for all the kindness and patience Morrie had shown me when I was young, I should have dropped the phone and jumped from the car, run and held him and kissed him on the forehead hello.
Instead, I killed the engine and sunk down off the seat, as if I were looking for something.
I did what I had become best at doing: I tended to my work, even while my professor waited on his front lawn. I am not proud of this, but this is what I did.”
Sometimes in life we know the things we should do, but many of the times we do not follow through. It’s a sad ordeal and can leave one with a regretful life. Follow through with what you know and feel.
He coughed, and then regained his smile. “I’m on the last great journey here – and people want me to tell them what to pack.”
“Dying,” Morrie suddenly said, “is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else. So many of the people who come to visit are unhappy.” Why? “Well for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. Most people can’t do it. They’re unhappier than me – even in my current condition.”
“I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving caring souls. How many people can say that?”
“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”
“But it’s hard to explain, Mitch. Now that I’m suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before.”
View Rob Bell, Drops Like Stars on suffering.
“Silence. Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?”
“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.”
“Everyone knows they are going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things much differently.”
“To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.”
“The truth is Mitch, once you’ve learned how to die, you learn how to live.”
And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. – Luke 9:23
“Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live, but there’s one thing. The things you spend so much time on – all the work you do – might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some spiritual things. You hate that word don’t you? ‘Spiritual.’ You think it’s touchy feely stuff.”
“The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. It’s become quite clear to me, as I’ve been sick. 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.’”
“This is part of what family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died – what I call your ‘spiritual security’ – knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.”
“Detach yourself. Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.”
“But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is you know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.’”
“It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”
“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.”
“It’s impossible for the old not to envy the young. But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that. This is your time to be in your times. I had my time to be in my thirties, and now it is time to be seventy-eight.”
“Do kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back.”
“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.”
“I’ve learned this much about marriage. You get tested. You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don’t.”
“Still, there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.”
“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 your 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.”
“The problem is Mitch, we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and blacks. Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.”
“Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”
“In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive right? And the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right? But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.”
“Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long.”
“Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”
“There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?”
“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.”
“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
“You no longer have what you have with that person. You want them back. You never want them to stop. But that’s part of being human. Stop, renew, stop, renew.”
“None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded. But if Professor Morris Schwartz taught me anything at all, it was this: there is no such thing as ‘too late’ in life. He was changing until the day he said goodbye.”