The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2004 TV Movie)

Ellen Burstyn: Ruby

Quotes 

• Ruby : Eddie, anger is a poison. It eats us inside. We think when we hate someone we hurt them, but hatred is a curved blade, and the harm we do to others we also do to ourselves.

• Eddie : Why is everything so different than I thought?

  Ruby : Well, when you first came here, do you remember how you felt?

  Eddie : I had no pain, no worry.

  Ruby : No hate. That's because no one is born with anger. We build it over the years with the things we don't say, with the things we bury. When we die, the soul is freed of it, free to see the truth.

• [first lines] 

  Ruby : [narrating]  This is a story about a man named Eddie. And it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. You might think it's strange to start a story with an ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.

• Ruby : [narrating]  Eddie saw nothing of his final moment on Earth. He felt no pain from his death. All he felt was lightness and calm, as if every hurt he had ever suffered had been washed away. And then he woke up.

• Eddie : [looking at Ruby's photos]  Most of it was before my time.

  Ruby : Well, things that come before your time can still affect you, even if they are in the "old files."

• Ruby : And I nurtured one impossible wish.

  Eddie : What wish was that?

  Ruby : [about Ruby Pier]  That he had never built that place.

  Eddie : I had that thought a few times myself.

• [last lines] 

  Ruby : This is the story of a man named Eddie, who lived and died, and would one day himself share the secret of Heaven - that each life affects the other, and the other affects the next.

  [He sees his wife on the ferris wheel] 

  Ruby : And the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.