Quotes from Jane Rule

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

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

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.

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.

I believe only in art and failure.

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.

Part of the excitement for the tourist was his feeling that he had crossed the moral boundary of society as be crossed the threshold of a gambling casino. The fact that the reputable casinos were operated on a code of honesty more rigid than in any bank made no difference.

The candor of Ann's absolute nakedness, not caught in unselfconsciousness like a young nude in a romantic painting, but fully aware of her erotic power, roused in Evelyn an arrogance of body, a lust that burned through her nerves like the fire of the sun they both stood in. This was the freedom she wanted, an animal freedom exposed to the emptiness of sky and land and water.

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

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.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

She made love to break love.

Evelyn wanted to be charming, provocative, desirable, attributes she had never aspired to before out of pride, perhaps, or fear of failure. Now they seemed most instinctive. She was finding, in the miracle of her particular fall, that she was, by nature, a woman. And what a lively thing it was to be, a woman.

And the world must always seem to be either the Garden of Eden, from which he is about to be expelled, or a circle in hell, into which he has wandered like Dante or Orpheus only to find that he can't get out.

Evelyn looked at Ann, the child she had always wanted, the friend she had once had, the lover she had never considered. Of course she wanted Ann. Pride, morality, and inexperience had kept her from admitting it frankly to herself from the first moment she had seen Ann.