Jane Rule Quotes

#1. I believe only in art and failure.

Jane Rule

#2. 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

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

Jane Rule

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

Jane Rule

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

Jane Rule

#9. 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

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

Jane Rule

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

Jane Rule

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

Jane Rule

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

Jane Rule

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Jane Rule

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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