The Five People You Meet in Heaven

"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

"Adam's first night on earth? When he lays down to sleep? He thinks it's all over, right? He doesn't know what sleep is. His eyes are closing and the thinks he's leaving this world, right? Only he isn't. He wakes up the next morning and he has a fresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has yesterday."

"Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to."

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

Before he can devote himself to God or to a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation.

"You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself."

"He was a spender, a risk taker -- he went over the boards when he got an idea."

Even his happy moments feel encased, like holes jabbed in a hard sheet of ice.

He never speaks about the darkness to Marguerite. She strokes his hair and says, "What's wrong?" and he says, "Nothing, I'm just beat," and leaves it at that. How can he explain such sadness when she is supposed to make him happy? The truth is he cannot explain it himself. All he knows is that something stepped in front of him, blocking his way, until in time he gave up on things... He sat down in his life. And there he remained.

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

"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."

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. And Eddie found a certain love with Marguerite, a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable. Once she'd gone, [he had] let the days go stale.

"I ain't talked this much since I got here," he said. She nodded and smiled, a gentle smile, and at the sight of it, his eyes began to moisten and a wave of sadness washed over him...

...her eyebrows lifted and her lips spread and Eddie felt an old, warm feeling he had missed for years, the simple act of making his wife happy.

"Sounds strange, don't it?" Eddie said. "It sounds," she said, wistfully, "like someone else's summer." Eddie realized that was precisely what he'd been feeling for years.

"Love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. Life has to end," she said. "Love doesn't."

"I was still in love with you." "I know." She nodded. "I felt it." "Here?" he asked. "Even here," she said, smiling. "That's how strong lost love can be."

She held out her arms. And for the first time in heaven, he initiated his contact, he came to her, ignoring the leg, ignoring all the ugly associations he had made about dance and music and weddings, realizing now that they were really about loneliness.

It is never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary, and the paleness of surrender becomes the color of Eddie's days.

He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.