Jane Rule Quotes & Sayings

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity. — Jane Rule

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. — Jane Rule

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

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 a time, to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms, often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline, kindness, and laughter. It is love, very ordinary, human love, and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge. — Jane Rule

I believe only in art and failure. — Jane Rule

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

The terrifying message of gay liberation is that men are capable of loving their brothers. It should be sweet news to every womanin the world, for, if the capacity of men to love whom they have been taught to treat as competitors and enemies can transcend their education, the world can begin to heal. — Jane Rule

Charity is a cop-out so traditionally female in its apparent self-effacement that there seems resonant comfort in it. We're no longer supposed to serve the imaginations of men who have dominated us. We are to give up ourselves instead to those whose suffering is greater than our own. Looking down is just as distorting as looking up and as dangerous in perpetuating hierarchies. — Jane Rule

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

Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot. — Jane Rule

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

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. — Jane Rule

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. — Jane Rule

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

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

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. — Jane Rule

As a writer, I must be free to say what is in all the diversity I can command. I regret the distorting prejudices that surround me, whether they affect homosexuals or men or the physically handicapped and I can't alone defeat them. They will not defeat me, either as a lesbian or a writer. — Jane Rule

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. — Jane Rule

Now that our sexual experience is increasingly available to us as a subject for contemplation, we have to extend our language to express our new consciousness until we have as many words for sexuality as the Eskimo has for snow, that pervasive, beautiful, and mortal climate in which we all live. — Jane Rule

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. — Jane Rule

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. — Jane Rule

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. — Jane Rule

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 sort that would shock even the pessimists among us. — Jane Rule

Casino owners spoke more loudly than any of the other kings of industry to defend their contribution to society. They could speak more loudly because theirs was the purest activity of civilized man. They had transcended the need for a product. They could maintain and advance life with machines that made nothing but money. — Jane Rule

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. — Jane Rule

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. — Jane Rule

I remember how surprised I was when my first novel was about to be published and I was informed that I could be sued for anything any one of my characters said. 'But I often don't agree with what they say,' I protested. The lawyer was not interested in the clear distinction I make between my own voice and the voices of my characters. Neither, I have found, are many of my readers. — Jane Rule

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

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate. — Jane Rule