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.
But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.
The Lord withdraws when He is denied, and what is taken by the undeserving does not avail them unto salvation, since the saving grace is turned into ashes and holiness departs.
I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.
Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the other as by their own imagination. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.
If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Pride defeats its own end, by bringing the man who seeks esteem and reverence into contempt.
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