Janet Frame Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Janet Frame

  Freedom, Discovery, Self

  70 Copy quote

• 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

  Fear, Reflection, People

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

  56 Copy quote

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

  Janet Frame

  Writing, Haunting

  28 Copy quote

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

  Janet Frame

  Time, Past, Water

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

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Mean, Hands

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

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Years, Land

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

  39 Copy quote

• I like to see life with its teeth out.

  Janet Frame

  Teeth

  15 Copy quote

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

  Janet Frame

  Freedom, Men, Liberty

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

  28 Copy quote

• 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

  Fall, Writing, Ego

  31 Copy quote

• I must go down to the seas again to find where I buried the hatchet with Yesterday.

  Janet Frame

  Yesterday, Sea, Buried

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Journey, Land

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

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Darkness Within, Light

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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Wise, Taken, Listening

  Janet Frame (1951). “The lagoon: stories”

  11 Copy quote

• Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.

  Janet Frame

  Oneself, Preserves

  4 Copy quote

• All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.

  Janet Frame

  Journey, Land, Lost

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

  5 Copy quote

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

  Janet Frame

  Believe, Desire, Doe

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Memories, Moving

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

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Travel, Nice, Sheep

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

  20 Copy quote

• I don't wish to inhabit the human world under false pretences.

  Janet Frame

  World, Want, Humans

  "Towards Another Summer".

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Home, World, Able

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Light, Challenges

  Janet Frame (1972). “Daughter Buffalo”

  21 Copy quote

• Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

  Janet Frame

  Life Is, Hell, Prize

  Janet Frame (1963). “The reservoir: stories and sketches”

  16 Copy quote

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

  Janet Frame

  Spring, Winter, March

  37 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

• 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

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