Ru Freeman > Quotes

“He was with me, beside me, inside me, and I did not care that my children were asleep, alone at home, or that the neighbors might come to know. He burned the fear out of me until all was left was desire.”
― Ru Freeman, A Disobedient Girl

“There is no right and wrong, and precepts are for fools. Every thing is just as it is! And we must experience things without condemning them, because if we condemn them, then we are becoming too involved.”
― Ru Freeman, A Disobedient Girl

“Such bliss is not meant to last. In my husband's house, my children were my real gifts.”
― Ru Freeman, A Disobedient Girl

“And after that until the end, there was no relief from being a girl with chores that she wasn’t being paid for, a girl with no new sandals and a friend who wasn’t a friend but a mistress, and a family that wasn’t but people who owned her and ordered her about, and nothing at all but her pretty breasts and her round bottom and her misbehaving hair to help her feel any different.”
― Ru Freeman, A Disobedient Girl

“They are empty the way only things that contained too much can be.”
― Ru Freeman, A Disobedient Girl

“It was a crying shame!”
― Ru Freeman, A Disobedient Girl

“What I do have is the uplifting thrill of knowing that each one of my girls is slowly absorbing that old message passed down from my grandmother to my mother, neither of whom were able to live the truth, that we earn money not to save for the future but to live today, that all money is mad money: It is just a matter of where you choose to indulge your madness.”
― Ru Freeman

“And I have hundreds, yes, hundreds, of other items, the shoes, dresses, skirts, pants, jackets, scarfs, and jewelry, that remind me of what sits at the core of my anticonsumerist left-wig activist self: the knowledge that beauty is 99 percent belief, 1 percent standard; the proof that there is no funk, no setback, no ridicule that can erase the bliss of knowing that I can put myself together faster than most people can relieve a full bladder. And that at the end of it I can look pretty damned good.”
― Ru Freeman

“Diatonic, he heard the word in his head. Chromatic, pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic, each iteration of the scale opening innumerable possibilities for harmony. He thought about the Pythagorean major third, the Didymus comma, the way the intervals sound out of tune rather than as though they were different notes. This, he thought, was where his brilliance at mathematics bled into his love of music; music was the realm in which his mathematical brain danced.”
― Ru Freeman, On Sal Mal Lane