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

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
It was dark black water, secret, and the air was filled with murmurings and rustlings, it was as if they were walking into another world that had been kept secret from everyone and now they had found it.

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

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
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
Time past is not time gone, it is time accumulated with the host resembling the character in the fairytale who was joined along the route by more and more characters none of whom could be separated from one another or from the host, with some stuck so fast that their presence caused physical pain.

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

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

Janet Frame
We could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...

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

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
There must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

Janet Frame
It is always hard to believe that the will to change something does not produce an immediate change.

Janet Frame
Oh the train and the coloured pictures on the station, South America and Australia, and the bottle of fizzy drink you could only half finish... the houses that came and went like a dream. Clackety-clack, Kaitangata, Kaitangata.

Janet Frame
Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful place where we may meet Job and hear his cry, 'How long will you vex my soul and break me in pieces with words?

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

Janet Frame