“There is no plan, no future laid out for any of us beyond what we make for ourselves.”

“It is at those times that we can measure ourselves and confront a most startling moment. Life may not be what we thought it was, what it appeared to be; what possibly, for a time, it seemed certain that it was; in the end, we only knew what we thought it was about. It is, and was, bigger than us and beyond out plan. It is at those times we become aware of our humanity”

“My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.”

“Life is an act of endless creativity. With all its simmering tragedy and occasional catastrophe, a human life is an amazing thing to contemplate and experience. None of us had any special plan laid out for us when we were born. By abandoning the idea that an intelligent designer created us, we can wake with each dawn and say, "What's done is done. Now how can I make the best of the here and now?”

“We will never move out of the present and into the future with all God has planned for us if we cling to dwell in the past.”

“The future?' came the voice sadly...'And do we really pass anything on to the future, except mirrors of ourselves? What if the future is as painful as the past?' 'That we can never know,'answered the wolf angrily. 'That's for the future. But what we can know is the importance of what we owe the present. Here and now...What we owe to ourselves, and to those we're bound to. And we can at least hope to make a better future, for everything.”