Life & Wisdom Quote by Ann Rule

Ann Rule’s line reads like a polite request, but it’s really a hard-earned rebuke. “Try to open up your mind a little” is soft language doing sharp work: it’s aimed at the reflexive moralizer, the person who treats other people’s lives as a simple set of choices and failures. Rule doesn’t ask for abstract empathy; she sets a condition that exposes how cheap certainty can be. “Move away from rigid opinions of what people should do and be” attacks the comfort of prescribing behavior from a safe distance, where consequences don’t land on your skin.

The kicker is the clause that narrows the field: “unless you have been there.” It’s not a blanket ban on judgment; it’s a demand for earned authority. Rule spent her career writing about crime, violence, and the messy psychology around it - the kinds of stories that show how quickly “should” collapses under fear, coercion, poverty, addiction, love, and survival. In that context, the quote doubles as a warning about narrative: outsiders tend to flatten people into types (victim, monster, bad decision-maker) because it’s easier than holding contradiction.

The subtext is also a critique of spectacle. True-crime culture invites armchair sentencing, a market for hot takes about what someone “should” have done. Rule insists that proximity matters, that the lived interior of a situation changes the moral math. It’s humility framed as a boundary: if you weren’t in the room, don’t pretend you know the script.