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.
Interpretation
The quote expresses frustration over societal biases related to gender, intelligence, and physical attributes.
Jane Rule reflects on the inequity of how society perceives and values traits like height and intelligence differently based on gender. She highlights her desire to escape the limitations placed on her due to being a girl, suggesting that the qualities admired in boys are often seen as flaws in girls, thus inviting a deeper discussion on gender norms and equality.
In practice
During a discussion on gender equality in a classroom setting.
It's not the length but the quality of life that matters to me. It has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time, to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms, often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline, kindness, and laughter. It is love, very ordinary, human love, and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge.
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.
Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.
The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
A tear that trembles for a little while _x000D_ Upon the trembling eyelid, till the world _x000D_ Wavers within its circle like a dream, _x000D_ Holds more of meaning in its narrow orb _x000D_ Than all the distant landscape that it blurs.
The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.
Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.
Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.
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