For One More Day by Mitch Albom

• Every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.
• You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
• It's like this line is drawn somewhere in the world and if you never cross it, you'll never consider throwing yourself off a building or swallowing a bottle of pills--but if you do, you might.
• The truth is, there is no line. There's only your life, how you mess it up, and who is there to save you. Or who isn't.
• One day can bend your life.
• When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those you love.
• When your parents die, you feel like instead of going into every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.
• Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in.
• When you're that young, you nest in your parents' plans, not your own.
• She told me I was smart and that being smart was a privilege, and she insisted that I read one book every week, and took me to the library to make sure this happened.
• Don't you ever tell a child something's too hard.
• I don't know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make--pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad--but it carries a certain taste of memory.
• Sometimes kids want you to hurt the way they hurt.
• A child embarrassed by his mother is just a child who hasn't lived long enough.
• Going back to something is harder than you think.
• You do what you gotta do to hold your family together.
• There may be times that you fight, and sometimes you won't even like each other. But those are the times you have to love your marriage. It's like a third party. Look at your wedding photos. Look at any memories you've made. And if you believe in those memories, they will pull you back together.
• The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature. You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.
• When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.
• You count the hours you could have spent with your mother. It's a lifetime in itself.
• A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way.
• The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.
• I think you have to try things in life. Belief, hard work, love--you have those things, you can do anything.
• When you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.
• You make it up as you go along.
• You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.
• Parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't. But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.
• One day spent with someone you love can change everything.

7/17/2011

The Help by Kathryn Sockett

• The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.
• My real dream was that one day I would write something that people would actually read.
• Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person.
• Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?
• All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
• What would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?
• Dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town.
• I feel guilty for not being nicer to her, for not needing her until my own life turns bad.
• White people been representing colored opinions since the beginning a time.
• My motto on housekeeping: when in doubt, wash it out.
• It was a accident. Kicking her ain't gone do us no good.
• Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you, it's so good.
• Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.
• Everybody care. Black, white, deep down we all do.
• It ain't the color a the wrapping that count, it's what we is inside.
• I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful.
• Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn. I used to believe in em. I don't anymore. They in our heads. People make us believe they there. But they ain't.
• Kindness don't have no boundaries.
• I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.
• Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.
• I am looking for a future for myself. I like to hear about the possibilities of others.
• There is so much you don't know about a person. I wonder if I could've made her days a little bit easier, if I'd tried. If I'd treated her a little nicer.
• When she do things, they done the first time.
• Trying to understand is vital to our humanity.

7/16/2011