Tuesday, January 8, 2013

How One Quotation Saved Someone's Life

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When Og Mandino wrote, "I will love the light for it shows me the way. Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars," he probably never realized that those words might save someone’s life.''
 

But it did. I know because of a letter that I received from a teenager who wrote, “I know there are hundreds of other inspiring quote books in the world, yet it was your particular book that helped to save my life years ago.”

 

“My dad passed away when I was eleven,” the teenager wrote. “I remember the birthday when he had handed me your book, and how I hadn’t been too thrilled to see what it was. But looking back now, I guess he had been the only one who had seen into me—seen how depressed I had truly been—and done something about it.”


“Upon opening the book and reading such touching words, I had been struck with an emotion so deep and powerful, I still don’t know of any words to describe it—I only know it was then that I had begun to find myself; I had glimpsed my first twinkle of starlight in a dark, cloudy, sky in the pages of this book. And with each quote I had read, a new star had shown bright.”'

 

After thanking me for writing the book and saying again “You saved my life. You really did!,” the teenager concludes, “And now I have a picture of my dad marking the page with the Og Mandino quote: ‘I will love the light for it shows me the way. Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.’” 

 

P.S.- The quote comes from the book Change Your Life!: A Little Book of Big Ideas, published by Viva Editions, Berkeley, CA.