Janet Frame Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• [...] 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

  Glasses, Flames, Sky

  14 Copy quote

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

  Janet Frame

  Irrelevance, Law, Attention

  26 Copy quote

• ...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

  Choices, Decision, Imperfect

  Janet Frame (2001). “An Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography”, Womens PressLtd

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Sweet, Sleep

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Cousin, Fall, Thinking

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Regret, Mean, Successful

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Wall, Lying, Tired

  Janet Frame (1980). “Faces in the water”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, Giving Up, Angel

  Janet Frame (1990). “Daughter buffalo”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Pain, Character, Past

  Janet Frame (1985). “To the is-land: an autobiography”, George Braziller

  9 Copy quote

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

  Janet Frame

  Wind, Wire, Electricity

  Janet Frame (1980). “Faces in the water”

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Discovery, Tree, Brain

  Janet Frame (2010). “Towards Another Summer”, p.105, Counterpoint Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Needs, Division, Helping

  Janet Frame (1980). “Scented gardens for the blind: a novel”, George Braziller

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving, What If, Diaries

  Janet Frame, Carole Ferrier (1995). “The Janet Frame reader”, Womens Pr Ltd

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Powerful, Bags, Flow

  Janet Frame (2010). “Towards Another Summer”, p.146, Counterpoint Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Beach, Black, Littles

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Light, Snow, Judgement

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Lonely, Land, People

  Janet Frame (1980). “Faces in the water”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Eye, Giving

  Janet Frame (1998). “The Complete Autobiography”, Womens PressLtd

  4 Copy quote

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

  Janet Frame

  Thinking, Poet

  Janet Frame (1998). “The Complete Autobiography”, Womens PressLtd

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Thinking, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Cutting, Men, Hair

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Thinking, World

  Janet Frame (1998). “The Complete Autobiography”, Womens PressLtd

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mistake, Paper, Toilets

  4 Copy quote

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