Janet Frame Quotes

38 quotes in 909 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.
• The sooner you 'settle' the sooner you'll be allowed home" was the ruling logic; and "if you can't adapt yourself to living in a mental…
• 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…
• I like to see life with its teeth out.
• They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.
• Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.
• 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…
• 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,…
• Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.
• 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…
• I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.
• 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…
• 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…
• ...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…

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