Jane Rule Quotes

People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

My private measure of success is daily. If this were to be the last day of my life would I be content with it? To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

If we don't bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.

Knowledge is a collective enterprise. Without it understanding is impossible. Ignorance is too often a murderous vulnerability.

The real power of books is their deep companionability. We learn from them as we learn from the deep companionability of love to know our own hearts and minds better.

I believe only in art and failure.

Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness.

I was very frightened when I turned forty. I suddenly thought I ought to wake up and be speaking with the voice of God.

This desert town was man's own miracle of pure purposelessness.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they're married, then one always suspects they don't.

The kinds of good friends I have are people who are perfectly willing to have me say I'll see them in six months, and live right next door.

I had never been as resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes perhaps because although I couldn't sew I could think.