Have you ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine? If you are lucky enough to find your way to such teachers, you will always find your way back. Sometimes it is only in your head. Sometimes it is right alongside their beds.
When love dries in a marriage, the children become mortar for the bricks. When the children leave, the bricks just sit atop each other. When the children die, the bricks tumble.
The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn Is just to love, and be loved in return.” He.
You’re never in love with anyone the way you are when you’re eighteen, on a beach, at night, with your shoes off. I still can’t believe he’s gone.
The most precious thing you can give someone is your time, Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.
For centuries, musicians have sought to find me at the end of a needle or the bottom of a drink. It is an illusion. And it often ends badly. Take.
Everyone joins a band in this life. One way or another, the band breaks up.
First loves often remain in the heart, like plants that cannot grow in sunlight.
Have you ever known a man of faith? Did you run the other way? If so, stop running. Maybe sit for a minute. For a glass of ice water. For a plate of corn bread. You may find there is something beautiful to learn, and it doesn’t bite you and it doesn’t weaken you, it only proves a divine spark lies inside each of us, and that spark may one day save the world.
You humans are always locking each other away. Cells. Dungeons. Some of your earliest jails were sewers, where men sloshed in their own waste. No other creature has this arrogance – to confine its own. Could you imagine a bird imprisoning another bird? A horse jailing a horse?
Over time, I guess all your teachers find their way into your music, right?
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry.
Our culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you’re about to die. We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks – we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habbit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?
Once, when Giselle was alive, he thought about the future. Now he only thought about the past.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops -Henry Adams.
When we build, we build on the shoulders of those who came before us. And when we fall apart, those who came before us help put us back together.
This is the disarming power of children: their need makes you forget your own.
You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does.
Amazing, I thought. I worked in the news business. I covered stories where people died. I interviewed grieving family members. I even attended the funerals. I never cried. Morrie, for the suffering of people half a world away, was weeping. Is this what comes at the end, I wondered? Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
And while she didn’t know it then, she was learning another truth about love: it comes when it comes. Simple as that.