Janet Frame Quotes

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

Janet Frame

#2. I felt, just then, a kind of indebtedness to green, the colour.

Janet Frame

#3. 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

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

Janet Frame

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Janet Frame

#12. 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

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

Janet Frame

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Janet Frame

#20. 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

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

Janet Frame

#22. Life is hell, but there are prizes.

Janet Frame

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. I tried to say beware the room is laid with traps and hung with hooks.

Janet Frame

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

Janet Frame

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Janet Frame

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

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

Janet Frame

#35. Death is a dramatic accomplishment of absence; language may be almost as effective.

Janet Frame

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

Janet Frame

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. "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

#41. 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

#42. I like to see life with its teeth out.

Janet Frame

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

Janet Frame

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.

Janet Frame

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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