Janet Frame Quotes (11 Quotes)

I like to see life with its teeth out.

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

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.

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

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

My memory of myself contains now myself looking outward and myself looking within from without, developing the view that others might have of me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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