Janet Frame Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.”
-- Janet Frame -
“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 -
“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 -
“I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.”
-- Janet Frame -
“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 -
“For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.”
-- Janet Frame -
“For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.”
-- Janet Frame -
“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 -
“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 -
“They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.”
-- 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 -
“Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.”
-- Janet Frame -
“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 -
“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 -
“I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.”
-- Janet Frame -
“Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.”
-- Janet Frame -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.”
-- Janet Frame -
“...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 -
“[...] 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“I must go down to the seas again to find where I buried the hatchet with Yesterday.”
-- 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 -
“Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.”
-- Janet Frame -
“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
