If you love something so much let it go. If it comes back it was meant to be; if it doesn't it never was.

And suddenly you just know it's time to start something new and trust in the magic of beginnings.

I don't think you should spend your life praying for things, but I do believe you should thank God for what He's given you… but I think the scripture teaches us that we can pray for our dreams, pray for the big things… he's not a small God; this God is incredible.

We are free to choose our actions, . . . but we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.

Your latter days are supposed to be greater than your former days.

Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.

You see, we don't have enough sense to make these decisions. Somehow, you just get led to where you're supposed to be, if you're willing to submit.

I don't remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. That story has surprised me almost every day—but now, in the year 1986, so near the end, it seems not surprising at all but only a little strange, as if it all has happened to somebody I don't yet quite know. Certainly, all of it has happened to somebody younger.

And yet in Port William, as everywhere else, it was already the second decade of the twentieth century. And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else.

But whatever you hope, you will find out that you can't bargain with your life on your own terms. It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped.

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on.