Renee > Renee's Quotes

“We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

“I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person as a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible: Two Essays

“If I get married, I want to be very married.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.”
― Emily Dickinson

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“It is easy to think you have a heart for orphans on the other side of the world, but to resent the demands of the children in your living room. You cannot have a heart for the gospel and fussiness about your life at the same time.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Mom Enough: The Fearless Mother's Heart and Hope

“Prioritizing obedience in the face of stress is a wonderful way to disarm it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Real life is messy because it is going somewhere. Things constantly need to be done because people are constantly growing.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“The more you discipline yourself to overcome discouragement with obedience, the less discouragement there will be to overcome.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Gratitude is like that. It transforms. It is such a force that it cannot coexist with selfishness, with discouragement, with discontent.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Sin is a fact of life. It is the way we deal with it that changes ours.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches

“Treat sins that your children struggle with like basic math. Practice, Practice, and you'll get it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches

“We could get so into health food that our husband doesn't feel welcome at his own table. In other words, we could get so consumed with the healthy food that we are no longer healthy people. We could, in pursuit of health, break fellowship with our husbands as well as Jesus”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“When you believe to your core that you are forgiven and loved, one of the first things that happens is you start doing things. Fruit is intimately connected with forgiveness. When we are forgiven, we do not gallop out into a life of ambiguity and indifference. We do not become great negotiators of whether or not it matters that we aren’t doing things. We become filled with gratitude, love, joy, and peace. And then, having a firm foundation of another’s righteousness, we are free to go out and do.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

“Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes