McKaela

“If I wasn't a human girl I think I'd like to be a bee and live among the flowers.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“You're finding that atheism isn't a belief system. It's just a lack of belief in God. You can't build a life on that. It's like trying to build a league of people who don't play golf. Total nonsense.
But let's look at things with new eyes. Was the sunrise any less beautiful today just because it won't be around forever? Is the time with your family worthless because it won't be around forever? Is life any less of a gift just because it's a result of physics?
So, God gave you meaning. Do you still care about the needy? Do you still want to be a good father? Then do those things, make them your life's purpose. You don't need some God to tell you to be good--you can be good on your own. And isn't that more meaningful? To love and to make the world a better place because you choose to?
...
You get one life, one shot to find every beautiful sight, to help others, and to enjoy the odd series of events that allow a bag of organic molecules to know they exist. Don't waste it.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature. All 'spirit and fire and dew,' as she was, the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity. Marilla felt this and was vaguely troubled over it, realizing that the ups and downs of existence would probably bear hardly on this impulsive soul and not sufficiently understanding that the equally great capacity for delight might more than compensate. Therefore Marilla conceived it to be her duty to drill Anne into a tranquil uniformity of disposition as impossible and alien to her as to a dancing sunbeam in one of the brook shallows. She did not make much headway, as she sorrowfully admitted to herself. The downfall of some dear hope or plan plunged Anne into 'deeps of affliction.' The fulfillment thereof exalted her to dizzy realms of delight. Marilla had almost begun to despair of ever fashioning this waif of the world into her model little girl of demure manners and prim deportment. Neither would she have believed that she really liked Anne much better as she was.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Abitha could see that these people believed, truly believed, that they were doing God’s work here this day. And there was something about these people that horrified Abitha even worse than those whose faces were lined with cruelty. As at least cruelty was a thing that could be pointed out, confronted. But this belief, this absolute conviction that this evil they were doing was good, was God’s work—how, she wondered, how could such a dark conviction ever be overcome?”
― Brom, Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery