Janet Frame Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Janet Frame
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

Janet Frame
It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

Janet Frame
From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.

Janet Frame
He sees the land of meaning, and one path to it, and the so-called normal people traveling swiftly and in comfort to the land; he does not include the shipwrecked people who arrive by devious lonely routes, and the many who dwell in the land in the beginning.

Janet Frame
When I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?

Janet Frame
Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind

Janet Frame
'The sooner you "settle" the sooner you'll be allowed home' was the ruling logic; and 'if you can't adapt yourself to living in a mental hospital how do you expect to be able to live "out in the world"?' How indeed?

Janet Frame
Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

Janet Frame
Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.

Janet Frame
Mother always said things would be all right, cats and birds and people even, as if she knew, and she did know too, Mother always knew.

Janet Frame
Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye.

Janet Frame
The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge), but simply written; it's a dreadful, awful fact that writing is like any other work.

Janet Frame
Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sunlight as they lie embedded in the wall, are mistaken for jewels.

Janet Frame
She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish you see on the beach, and you touch them, and then go inside and don't come out.

Janet Frame
They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.

Janet Frame
Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.

Janet Frame
Deep from her blue apron pocket
she drew a ripe orange to slice
and squirt light
— your mouth was stained with sun.

Janet Frame
The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.

Janet Frame
It was a distinguished sea, oh and a lovely one, noisy in your ears and green and blue... it was the right kind of sea.

Janet Frame
Patients did not usually interrupt his rounds and any delay in his progress caused as much concern among the staff as if an important train carrying bullion had been held up by bandits.

Janet Frame
Death is a dramatic accomplishment of absence; language may be almost as effective.

Janet Frame
Bereavement is waiting, waiting for
a known death to be undone.

Janet Frame
Possibility was not a bag or box that could be closed and sealed, it was a vast open chute which received everything, everything; one could not choose or direct or destroy the powerful flow of possibility.

Janet Frame
Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.

Janet Frame