Janet Frame quotes

Janet Frame was a New Zealand novelist, poet, and memoirist whose work is celebrated for its emotional depth and originality. Her writing was shaped by personal struggles with mental health and experiences in psychiatric institutions. She became an influential literary figure and received numerous international accolades for her contributions to literature. Here are 15 of her quotes:

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.

Janet Frame

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Janet Frame

I like to see life with its teeth out.

Janet Frame

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

Janet Frame

Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.

Janet Frame

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

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.

Janet Frame

They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.

Janet Frame

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

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?

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.

Janet Frame

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

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.

Janet Frame