Jane Rule > Quotes

“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

“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 its charm. And it's real."

"So we should all get jobs in gambling casinos."

"We all do," Ann said, her voice amused. "What do you think the University of California is? It's just a minor branch of the Establishment. The only difference is that it has to be subsidized."

"Are you talking nonsense on purpose?"

"No, I'm serious."

"You think nothing has any value?"

"No, 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," Ann said…

"I live in the desert of the heart," Evelyn said quietly, "I can't love the whole damned world." 'Love me, Evelyn.' 'I do.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“She made love to break love.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“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.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“...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.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“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.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“CONVENTIONS, LIKE CLICHÉS, HAVE a way of surviving their own usefulness. They are then excused or defended as the idioms of living. For everyone, foreign by birth or by nature, convention is a mark of fluency. That is why, for any woman, marriage is the idiom of life.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“…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.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Evelyn looked at Ann, the child she had always wanted, the friend she had once had, the lover she had never considered. Of course she wanted Ann. Pride, morality, and inexperience had kept her from admitting it frankly to herself from the first moment she had seen Ann.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“And the world must always seem to be either the Garden of Eden, from which he is about to be expelled, or a circle in hell, into which he has wandered like Dante or Orpheus only to find that he can’t get out.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“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.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Frances was, by nature, an organizer. She wanted to believe that happiness could be arranged. Well, perhaps it could.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“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.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“This isn’t sand at all.”
“No,” Ann said, kneeling beside her. “They’re tiny shells.”
White snail shells, no bigger than the head of a pin, caught along the lines of Evelyn’s palm. She studied them with uncertain wonder, then looked up at the beach itself, white with billions of dwarf deaths, free fossil washed, yes, gently, into petrified rhythms along the shore.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Ann asked.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“I live in the desert of the heart. I can't love the whole damned world.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“The will bakes bread the nature chokes on. The nature turns the wheel the will breaks on.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“The desert seems to me the simple truth about the world.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“You loved the world for its own sake or not at all.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“All intelligent women are latent homosexuals”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Ann, marked on both wrists by her father’s death wish, wandered among ruins and graves, looked out across the desolation of desert as her inheritance, and loved life. How?”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“You love all the world, little fish. You think god made even the desert for you to swim in. But you want to be free.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“But wrong, over and over again, wearing one ill-fitting uniform after another of the world’s conventions. The only dress that ever suited her was her academic gown, but it was hardly appropriate for the daily occasions of her living.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Part of the excitement for the tourist was his feeling that he had crossed the moral boundary of society as be crossed the threshold of a gambling casino. The fact that the reputable casinos were operated on a code of honesty more rigid than in any bank made no difference.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“She drank her juice and coffee as she dressed, feeling reluctant and yet relieved. The desert, a derelict gold-mining town, a day in the heat both bored and frightened her. Wide awake she could not be quite so resolute, but two days in the isolation of her work had made her value human company. She was through with silence and righteous indignation.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“The faithful say the plain was well watered, even as the Garden of the Lord, before He destroyed the cities. I don’t believe it. There was never water here, not fresh water.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Sudden, near lightning startled them both, and, as the first large drops of rain fell on the beach, they hurriedly gathered their belongings and started toward the car, leaving their unimportant intimacy like a scrap of paper on the empty beach.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“The beach itself was sheltered by the cliff from the wind and from the sun and from the view of the unending shore line. In that great openness of water, desert, and sky, it was curiously private; but the security it provided was, for Evelyn, a frail illusion. She was, nevertheless, grateful for it. She set the blanket and towels down almost against the cliff itself, twenty feet from the water, and sat down to watch Ann who had kicked off her shoes and was wading out from the shore to plant a bottle of wine.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“The candor of Ann’s absolute nakedness, not caught in unselfconsciousness like a young nude in a romantic painting, but fully aware of her erotic power, roused in Evelyn an arrogance of body, a lust that burned through her nerves like the fire of the sun they both stood in. This was the freedom she wanted, an animal freedom exposed to the emptiness of sky and land and water.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“She could not cry. She could only sweat. Suffering was a winter luxury.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Clichés were only a sin in literature. In life, if they happened to be true, there was no intellectual campaign that would defeat them.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart