Janet Rebhan > Janet's Quotes

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”
― Henry Ford

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.”
― Charles de Lint, Moonheart

“I’m a survivor. And like the moon, I have a feeling it would take a truly spectacular event to keep me from taking my place in the scheme of things, waxing, waning, and eclipsing notwithstanding.”
― Janet Rebhan, Finding Tranquility Base

“There's a fine line between forgiveness and denial.”
― Janet Rebhan, Finding Tranquility Base

“[T]hink of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”
― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

“The half-life of love is forever.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
― Coco Chanel

“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Nelson Mandela

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim MORRISON

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“In this new year, may you have a deep understanding of your true value and worth, an absolute faith in your unlimited potential, peace of mind in the midst of uncertainty, the confidence to let go when you need to, acceptance to replace your resistance, gratitude to open your heart, the strength to meet your challenges, great love to replace your fear, forgiveness and compassion for those who offend you, clear sight to see your best and true path, hope to dispel obscurity, the conviction to make your dreams come true, meaningful and rewarding synchronicities, dear friends who truly know and love you, a childlike trust in the benevolence of the universe, the humility to remain teachable, the wisdom to fully embrace your life exactly as it is, the understanding that every soul has its own course to follow, the discernment to recognize your own unique inner voice of truth, and the courage to learn to be still.”
― Janet Rebhan

“The new is always at our doorstep when we feel most lost.”
― Janet Rebhan, Learn To Be Still: Select Essays on the Spiritual Life

“Gratitude is a divine shift in your perspective from one of separation and lack to one of unity and right mindedness. It is a choice not made from guilt but rather from a higher level of consciousness.”
― Janet Rebhan, Learn To Be Still: Select Essays on the Spiritual Life

“Ego likes comfort zones, safety, familiarity, boundaries, limits, a god who stays put in a box, and the known vs. the unknown. Ego can be a wimp. Unlike what most people believe, ego is not about too much confidence. Ego is about not enough confidence—confidence in the divine part of ourselves.”
― Janet Rebhan, Learn To Be Still: Select Essays on the Spiritual Life

“In transitions, we must learn to be still. Being still is, in part, about learning to be comfortable with ambiguity.”
― Janet Rebhan, Learn To Be Still: Select Essays on the Spiritual Life

“Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“I searched among her crayons for a color that represented autumn and pulled out an orange-toned crayon, never used. It read “Bittersweet,” and I wondered why that particular name. Autumn was my favorite time of year… I was always ready for the change. I guess some people didn’t see it that way. Some people wanted to cling to summer... I loved both seasons, but I thought no one would ever call spring bittersweet, even though it was just another change, another new cycle, an end to one season and a beginning for another in an endless, never-ending spiral.”
― Janet Rebhan, Finding Tranquility Base

“Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”
― Voltaire