Andrea Haas

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“As for suffering I do not wish even the slightest; as for happiness I am never satisfied. In this, there is no difference between others and me. Bless me so I may take joy in others’ happiness.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

“Theirs was the snot-nosed, sticky-fingered world of peanut butter sandwiches and cartoons, playgrounds and superhero pajamas, crayons and pop-up books, booster chairs and midday naps. Their world existed no farther than the reach of their tiny arms. They were new. Innocent. Vulnerable. Yet they were somehow able to take personal and public responsibility for a hard-wired sin nature, implored to pledge allegiance to an invisible overlord they could not see, and charged to prevent their own torture in a nasty, horrible place that the Vacation Bible School teachers called Hell.”
― Seth Andrews, Deconverted: a Journey from Religion to Reason

“we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead