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...

No life is a waste .

You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a...

I mourn my dwindling time, but i cherish the chance it gives me to make things right.

He could not feel agony. He could not feel sadness. His consciousness felt smoky, wisplike, incapable of anything but calm

He ran down the heart of the old midway, where the weight guessers, fortune-tellers, and dancing gypsies had once worked. He lowered his chin and held his arms out like a glider, and every few steps...

Some of them she had seen for four years without exchanging a word. But that was how high school worked; it issued a verdict and you behaved accordingly.

Ethan had told the world, the world sympathized, and Sarah Lemon was now and forever {because wasn't cyberspace instantly forever?} someone you had to be 'nice' to, a pathetic girl who just didn't get...

That's who I want to be when I grow up.

ut heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps.

The old darkness has taken a seat alongside him. He is used to it by now, making room for it the way you make room for a commuter on a crowded bus.

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.

But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.

This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't...

Common sense has no place in first love and never has.

Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?

the classroom as a living, breathing place. They chose discussions over lectures, experience over theory. They sent students to the Deep South for civil rights projects and to the inner city for...

Mitch, it is 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 thirties. I had my time to be in my thirties, and...

When a colleague at Brandeis died suddenly of a heart attack, Morrie went to his funeral. He came home depressed.What a waste, he said. All those people saying those wonderful things, and Irv never...

He was intent on proving that the word 'dying' was not synonymous with 'useless'.

What do you do when the dead return? It is the thing people most fear- yet, in some cases, most desire

Small towns begin with a sign. The words can be as simple as the title of a story--Welcome to Harberville, Now entering Clawson--but once you cross, you are inside that story, and all that you do will...

He used the haunting phrase, Alas for what has been lost.

All he heard was his own labored breathing, followed by an echo of that breathing. He inhaled and heard a louder inhale. He exhaled, and it exhaled too. Eddie squeezed his eyes shut. Silence is worse...

At I Am My Brother's Keeper, there were no dues, no drives, no singles nights. Membership grew the old-fashioned way: a desperate need for God.

Two waves in the ocean are talking to each other, the front wave tells the second wave he's frightened because he is about to shore-crash and cease to exist, but the second wave tells him that he is...

Believe, hard work, love-you have those things, you can do anything.

Like a hidden grieving that rises to grab the heart, his soul was ambushed with old emotions, and his lips began to tremble and he was swept into the current of all that he had lost.

You can feel the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain - no matter how smart or accomplished - they cry, they yearn, they hurt. We all want the same things: comfort, love,...

but her absence was like a character in it.