Famous Quotes & Sayings

Janet Frame Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 70 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Janet Frame.

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Famous Quotes By Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 409493

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets
dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1300732

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 2118455

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1377310

But it is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoiid one another, and what more successful means of avoidance are there than words? Language will keep us safe from human onslaught, will express for us our regret at being unable to supply groceries or love or peace. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1535388

I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 2115032

I knew then that I would have to be careful. I would have to wear gloves, to leave no trace when I burgled the crammed house of feeling and took for my own use exuberance depression suspicion terror. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1516542

They all seemed hungry, happy, and healthy enough in their buzzing - oh the days were hot, and the noise of bees filled the air that was dusty with pollen and sun haze, and there were tiny black flies stuck to one another crowded by the creek and a creek stink rising from the deep pool under the willow tree where a wheat sack of new kittens had been drowned, and their tiny terrible struggling had shot like an electric current through the confusion of muddy water and up the arm of the person who had tied the stone around the mouth of the sack and thrust it into the water; and the culprit had not been able to brush away the current; it penetrated her body and made her heart beat with fear and pity. I was the culprit. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1006805

I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1056933

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1292683

They meant abnormal. 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

Janet Frame Quotes 2058448

Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks of a stream, catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb and turns quickly away, refusing to help or to search for help. We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget or help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighborhood of light we see our own face. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1728010

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

Janet Frame Quotes 89468

Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1036642

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1902316

[ ... ] a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun [ ... ] rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass. And the people: giant pathworks of colour with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 385076

I have to cry out here that language is all we have for the delicacy and truth of telling, that words are the sole heroes and heroines of fiction. Their generosity and forgiveness make one weep. They will accept anything and stand by it, and show no sign of suffering. They will accept change, painlessly, the only pain being that experienced by those who use words, scattering them like beans in a field and hoping for morning beanstalks as high as the sky with heavenly commotion there, upstairs where the giants live. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 902591

People do not cry because it is the end. They cry because the end does not correspond with their imagination of it. Their first choice is always their own imagining; they refuse to be deterred by warnings. They say I choose this because although the price is high the thing itself is more precious, durable and beautiful. The light of imagined events is always so arranged that the customers do not see the flaws in what they have chosen to buy with their dreams. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1860638

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1359101

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1390886

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1628561

And at times I murmured the token phrase to the doctor, 'When can I go home?' knowing that home was the place where I least desired to be. There they would watch me for signs of abnormality, like ferrets around a rabbit burrow waiting for the rabbit to appear. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 666343

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape - a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1961507

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

Janet Frame Quotes 2233327

I don't wish to inhabit the world under false pretences. I'm relieved to have discovered my identity after being so confused about it for so many years. Why should people be afraid if I confide in them? Yet people will always be afraid and jealous of those who finally establish their identity; it leads them to consider their own, to seclude it, cosset it, for fear it may be borrowed or interfered with, and when they are in the act of protecting it they suffer the shock of realising that their identity is nothing, it is something they dreamed and never knew; and then begins the painstaking search - what shall they choose - beast? another human being? insect? bird? — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 84936

I know there is a moment when sound slips down the torn lining of itself into silence, is carried unheard and secret in its own pocket. But the crimson birds could find no such escape, no means of slipping beyond themselves between the cracks of color and song to a white undiscovered silence. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 2198859

They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 2134038

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1419977

Nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to find, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it's a public nightmare. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1438150

I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the giant unreality. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1484030

Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to fine, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it's a public nightmare; if then strange beasts walk upside down like flies on the ceiling; crimson wings flap, the curtains fly; a sad man wearing a blue waistcoat with green buttons sits in the centre of the room, crying because he has swallowed the mirror and it hurts and he burps in flashes of glass and light; if crakes move and cry; the world is flipped, unrolled down in the vast marble stair; a stained threadbare carpet; the hollow silver dancing shoes, hunting-horns ... — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 2131279

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 2037925

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1736574

So I went up north to a land of palm trees and mangroves like malignant growths in the mud-filled throats of the bays, and orange trees with their leaves accepting darkly and seriously, in their own house as it were, the unwarranted globular outbursts of winter flame; and the sky faultless and remote. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1959933

Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1644390

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1809745

The fact is, very few of us are real imposters. And it's different from play-acting. Imposterism or imposture comes from the core of your being because there's nothing else there. Your central being never develops a self; that's not a disadvantage, entirely, though you do have to fight for your point of view, almost as if you were dead. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1654901

Then I rise disembodied from the dark to grasp and attach myself like a homeless parasite to the shape of my identity and its position in space and time. At first, I cannot find my way, I cannot find myself where I left myself, someone has removed all trace of me. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1676346

Life is hell, but there are prizes. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1807757

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1728790

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

Janet Frame Quotes 764153

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

Janet Frame Quotes 167308

I must go down to the seas again
to find where I
buried the hatchet with Yesterday. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 178331

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

Janet Frame Quotes 196007

What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 239121

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

Janet Frame Quotes 275389

Dr Howell drank from the special cup which was tied around the handle with red cotton to distinguish the staff cups from those of the patients, and thus prevent the interchange of disease like boredom loneliness authoritarianism. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 398956

It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are beautifully shaped, like a new church, like modern architecture, like a planned city — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 407843

I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what do you think of that? It was only a few minutes walk to trigger, then over the page to trinity, trinket and trional, and there my cousin used to fall asleep. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 419871

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 always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 449040

All writers
all beings
are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force ... All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 492059

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

Janet Frame Quotes 534821

I have always disliked the morning, it is too responsible a time, with the daylight demanding that it be 'faced' and (usually when I wake for I wake late) with the sun already up and in charge of the world, with little hope of anyone usurping or challenging its authority. A shot of light in the face of a poor waking human being and another slave limps wounded into the light-occupied territory. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 657787

I walked up the ramp and stood in the van, trying to decide where to begin my inspection of the concealed words whose bones were molded together by men to make either an awesome vision of truth that would guard any door of the mind, or a creature that would stand for a while, deceptively whole, then collapse, scattering across the threshold the dry dead bones that did not even burst into flame at their friction one with the other. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 679990

Both formality and dinner forgotten we sat on the floor of the little library, choosing. Sometimes Dr Portman read passages aloud and turned his own memories with their dark side to face the light. And it was late afternoon when, with a headache of happiness, I returned to the ward. And from that day I felt in myself a reserve of warmth from which I could help myself, like coal from the cellar on a winter's day, if the snow came or if the frost fell in the night to blacken the flowers and wither the new fruit. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 763578

I'm not there, she thought. I'm not there. I'm nowhere. She felt the world go dark with sudden exclusion and she was beating her wings against the door of the dark but no one opened the door; indeed, no one heard. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1325343

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

Janet Frame Quotes 783906

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

Janet Frame Quotes 841437

I inhabited a territory of loneliness which resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, living, to the world bring, inevitably, a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession.[It is] equal in its rapture and chilling exposure [to] the neighbourhood of the ancient gods and goddesses. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 868743

People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle - the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when people stare too close to silence they sometimes face their own reflections, their magnified shadows in the depths, and that frightens them. I know; I know. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 878123

I like to see life with its teeth out. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 918988

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

Janet Frame Quotes 944407

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1051614

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

Janet Frame Quotes 1062649

"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

Janet Frame Quotes 1139343

The sun is all love and murder, judgement, the perpetual raid of conscience, paratrooping light which opens like a snow-blossom in the downward drift of death. Wherever I turn - the golden cymbals of judgement, the summoning of the torturers of light. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1237224

Quick, where is the Red Cross God with the ointment and plaster the needle and thread and the clean linen bandages to mummify our festering dreams? — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1241801

When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation ... — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1246774

I tried to say beware the room is laid with traps and hung with hooks. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1269050

I felt, just then, a kind of indebtedness to green, the colour. — Janet Frame

Janet Frame Quotes 1308994

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