Janet Frame - Faces in the Water (1961)

10 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Janet Frame
There is no past present or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

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

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