Jane Rule Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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 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.

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

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

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

Jane Rule
Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness.

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
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
Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

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

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

Jane Rule