Jane Rule Quotes

21 quotes in 390 categories

• Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.
• Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.
• 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.
• 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,…
• To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.
• 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…
• If the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a…
• I was very frightened when I turned forty. I suddenly thought I ought to wake up and be speaking with the voice of God.
• Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they're married, then one always suspects they don't.
• Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.
• 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…
• It's not the length but the quality of life that matters to me. It has always been important to me to write one sentence at…
• I believe only in art and failure.
• The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.
• Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of…
• Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…

Browse Jane Rule Quotes by Category