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.
Only one thing can conquer war-that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.
To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.
We're left with so little to go on. Only the present is full enough to seem complete, and even that is an optical illusion. The moment is bleeding off the page. We live on the precipice of our perceptions. At the edge of every living instant, the world shears away like a cliff of ice into the sea of what is forgotten.
Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.
My only fear of death is reincarnation
God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexplicably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.
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