Quotes from Jane Rule

No relationship is without erotic feeling, Evelyn said. She had heard it somewhere at a cocktail party, an academic cocktail party. Someone else had added, as she added now, But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be acted upon.

I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day's work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved. What were we meant for then? To love the whole damned world.

she stretched and yawned, a suggestion of desire informing all her nerves. Extraordinary…not that she should feel desire but that she should not have felt it, consciously, for years.

CONVENTIONS, LIKE CLICHÉS, HAVE a way of surviving their own usefulness. They are then excused or defended as the idioms of living. For everyone, foreign by birth or by nature, convention is a mark of fluency. That is why, for any woman, marriage is the idiom of life.

You loved the world for its own sake or not at all.

Both the bride and the groom have the privilege of at least fifteen minutes in which to contemplate what a sick, sick, fucking, Christ-awful thing getting married is. That's what the book says — or words to that effect.

She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author's intention or achievement.

I live in the desert of the heart. I can't love the whole damned world.

Frances was, by nature, an organizer. She wanted to believe that happiness could be arranged. Well, perhaps it could.

This isn't sand at all." "No," Ann said, kneeling beside her. "They're tiny shells." White snail shells, no bigger than the head of a pin, caught along the lines of Evelyn's palm. She studied them with uncertain wonder, then looked up at the beach itself, white with billions of dwarf deaths, free fossil washed, yes, gently, into petrified rhythms along the shore. "Isn't it beautiful?" Ann asked.

All intelligent women are latent homosexuals

The desert seems to me the simple truth about the world.

The will bakes bread the nature chokes on. The nature turns the wheel the will breaks on.

She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author's intention or achievement.

Clichés were only a sin in literature. In life, if they happened to be true, there was no intellectual campaign that would defeat them.

All children suffered their parents' worlds. If she had had a child of her own, would she have done any better? " Jane Rule. "Desert of the Heart

She drank her juice and coffee as she dressed, feeling reluctant and yet relieved. The desert, a derelict gold-mining town, a day in the heat both bored and frightened her. Wide awake she could not be quite so resolute, but two days in the isolation of her work had made her value human company. She was through with silence and righteous indignation.

Ann, marked on both wrists by her father's death wish, wandered among ruins and graves, looked out across the desolation of desert as her inheritance, and loved life. How?

Because I can't help loving you, your wild, inaccurate emotions, your bizarre innocence, your angry sense of responsibility, your wrong-headed wit, your cockeyed joy, your cowboy boots, your absolutely magnificent body, your incredible eyes. I can't help it. I don't know how anyone could.

The faithful say the plain was well watered, even as the Garden of the Lord, before He destroyed the cities. I don't believe it. There was never water here, not fresh water.

She could not cry. She could only sweat. Suffering was a winter luxury.

Sudden, near lightning startled them both, and, as the first large drops of rain fell on the beach, they hurriedly gathered their belongings and started toward the car, leaving their unimportant intimacy like a scrap of paper on the empty beach.

But wrong, over and over again, wearing one ill-fitting uniform after another of the world's conventions. The only dress that ever suited her was her academic gown, but it was hardly appropriate for the daily occasions of her living.

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 growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.