I knew then that I would have to be careful. I would have…

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

— Janet Frame

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

— Janet Frame

“So I went up north to a land of palm trees and mangroves like malignant growths in the mud-filled throats of the bays, and…

— Janet Frame

“A certain pleasure was added to Grace’s relief at establishing herself as a migratory bird. She found that she understood the characters in her…

— Janet Frame

“I have to cry out here that language is all we have for the delicacy and truth of telling, that words are the sole…

— 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…

— Janet Frame

“Life is hell, but there are prizes. ”

— Janet Frame

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

— 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…

— Janet Frame

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

— 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…

— 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…

— Janet Frame

She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish…

— Janet Frame

Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the…

— Janet Frame

But it is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoiid one another, and what more successful means of avoidance are there than words?…

— Janet Frame