the five people you meet in heaven

yup, i was finally able to get down and read this one in 3 days. it was hard to put down because it had a rather interesting take on the idea of heaven. the book was very light yet thought-provoking. although it is a work of fiction, it still manages to make you think what your heaven will be, as it is different for each person.

i loved so many lines in this book. here are just some of them:

People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.

There are no random acts. We are all connected. You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind... Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to... Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them -- a mother's approval, a father's nod -- are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

Holding anger is poison. It eats you from the 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.

Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.

Lost love is still love. 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. Love doesn't.

lovely noh? and with that i am sure, joseph won't be able to keep himself from buying the book. i was telling him kasi to just borrow my copy since books are very costly in oz. imagine, AUD$ 22 (equivalent to around Php 900+) when i bought the book at a sale for only Php 220+.

by the way, what's also quite interesting was that the Philippines was mentioned several times in the book. even one character was Filipino, expressing a few words in tagalog (ina, bakya, sundalo to name a few).