You are what you think. Before you succeed physically, it had been done mentally. The hometown of both victory and defeat is the mind of a person.

Live life so well that, even if you die, the empty seats behind you will tell the story that, "yea, this soul did what God sent him/her to do". Give life and hope into your family, village, community, country, continent and the world at large. You can do it!

The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.

you’ll find the buildings taller, thatthe halls are full of ghostsbut everything still here iswhat you remember most

I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

Why come back to this empty house, and this Manila with a strange face; the one I never knew? All those lonely islands. They will keep afloat without me.

Because I miss them. Because I need them. Because I love them.