Jane Rule Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The desert frightens me, I think. It looks too much like the seventh circle of hell. I'm afraid of damnation."

"Why?"

"Why?" Evelyn repeated, peering at Ann from behind her hand. She lay back again and closed her eyes. "I don't know. I've always supposed everyone is."

"Well, they're not. I, for instance, am a hell of a lot more frightened of being saved." Evelyn chuckled.

"I'm serious," Ann protested. "Virtue smells to me of rotting vegetation. Here you burn or freeze. Either way it's clean."

"Sterile," Evelyn said and felt the word a laceration of her own flesh. "I wonder. It's fertility that's a dirty word for me."

"Is it?"

"Yes, I'm terrified of giving in, of justifying my own existence by means of simple reproduction. So many people do or try to. And there are the children, so unfulfilling after all. And they grow up to do nothing but reproduce children who will reproduce, everyone so busy reproducing that there's no time to produce anything. But it's such a temptation. It seems so natural - another dirty word for me. What's the point?"

"You'd have the human race die out?"

"No. We'll multiply in spite of ourselves always. We'll populate the desert. One day there will be little houses and docks all along this shore, signs of our salvation."

"What would you have us do instead?" Evelyn asked.

"Accept damnation," Ann said. "It has its power and

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

She made love to break love.

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

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.

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

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.

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

…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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe only in art and failure.

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.

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.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

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.