“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… — Janet Frame Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
I must go down to the seas again to find where I buried the hatchet with Yesterday. — Janet Frame Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
