Janet Frame Quotes

38 quotes in 909 categories

• Possibility was not a bag or box that could be closed and sealed, it was a vast open chute which received everything, everything; one could…
• The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending…
• ...When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of…
• The sun is all love and murder, judgement, the perpetual raid of conscience, paratrooping light which opens like a snow-blossom in the downward drift of…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I must go down to the seas again to find where I buried the hatchet with Yesterday.
• 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…
• There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.
• Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.
• I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door,…
• 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…
• She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish you…
• For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
• For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.
• 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…

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