Janet Frame quotes

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 always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth. (Janet Frame)
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. View quote
Janet Frame
There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water. View quote
Janet Frame
I like to see life with its teeth out. View quote
Janet Frame
Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought. View quote
Janet Frame
Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day. View quote
Janet Frame
I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses. View quote
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 you see on the beach, and you touch them, and then go inside and don't come out. View quote
Janet Frame
They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet. View quote
Janet Frame
For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction. View quote
Janet Frame
The word permanent... had its own kind of revenge on those who misused it, for the Bible said that nothing was permanent and everything came and went. (Janet Frame)
What use the green river, the gold place, if time and death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest from taking underground the green all-willowed and white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of song in pepper-pot breast of thrush? View quote
Janet Frame
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. View quote
Janet Frame
Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance. View quote
Janet Frame
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. View quote
Janet Frame