Top 447 Quotes & Sayings by Mitch Albom - Page 8

Being here in Detroit, our public education in this city is - it's shocking. And the oversight of it and the oversight of the teachers and the funding is nonexistent, and the priority that's put on it is so low.

Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is".

Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. It’s not so much, what’s the point? It’s more like, what’s the difference?

Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralysing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.

The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate who left campus that day headed for New York city, ready to offer the world his talent. The world, I discovered. was not all that interested.

You're not going to fix things by helping 65-year-olds or 75-year-olds for any long run.

That kind of love - the kind you realize you already have by the life you've created together - that's the kind that lasts.

I always look for a "rhythm" in my writing. A cadence to the sentences. Sometimes I think of pieces I write in a song writing infrastructure - i.e., a verse, a chorus that I return to, a bridge that's something differenct, a chorus that I return to.

I don't use any fance quill pens or pads, because I can't read my own handwriting. I just use whatever computer is laying around, and start writing.

I still think there is a way to take all the mistakes that we've made as adults and put a little bit of a salve on them, a little bit of a fix on them, if we just are a little smarter in what we teach our kids.

Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.

I hate to be like everyone else, but I'm rooting for San Antonio because I like teams that were built the old-fashioned way.

All these people that you meet or I meet, there's not a prayer in hell that they're ever going to run for office or major office because if they're that smart, they're also smart enough to know they don't want to take everything that they've built up and have it torn apart by a sensationalized media that's so hungry for any kind of salacious detail that they'll make that the emphasis of the person's life. And then all of sudden, 50, 60 years of hard work and accomplishment go out the window.

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.

And if you don´t commit? I asked. Your choice. But you miss what´s on the other side. What´s on the other side? "Ah" he smiled. "A happiness you cannot find alone

I never hear anything about education. Education - I guess it's just not sexy enough. And everybody claims to love their children and our children are the most important thing, but if that's the case, how come we never hear more about education as an election issue?

Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily... and the other ends badly.

You're not going to get to college - you're not even going to be qualified, even to go to a community college, if you don't address the basic problem of literacy in America. And there's no reason - no reason - for us to have that problem.

First and foremost, I would put a massive national emphasis on illiteracy with real markers that you could measure and real efforts to do a one-on-one kind of tutoring until kids can get up to snuff on that.

Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.

I would certainly make the attendance in college paid for, at least at a community college level or a state - you know, a sponsored university level so that if you wanted to go to college and if you had the grades - you might not go to Harvard - but you went to college.

My writing habits are pretty static. I get up every morning between 6 and 7 am, grab a cup of coffee, say a few prayers, and go downstairs to my office and start writing.

If you want to be a good writer, make sure you read. I'm amazed by how many people don't bother to do that.

You should be convinced of the authenticity of what you have, but you must also be humble enough to say that we don't know everything. And since we don't know everything, we must accept that another person may believe something else.

There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

Miracles happen quietly every day - in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a road side stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score.

Mothers support certain illusions about their children, and one of my illusions was that I liked who I was, because she did. When she passed away, so did that idea.