Janet Frame Quotes

New Zealand, Author
August 28, 1924 – January, 19, 2004.

Nene Janet Paterson Clutha ONZ CBE (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame. She wrote novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography. Frame's celebrity derived from her dramatic personal history as well as her literary career. Following years of psychiatric hospitalisation, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when, just days before the procedure, her début publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize.

I like to see life with its teeth out.

Janet Frame
- Life
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

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

Janet Frame
- Law
- Attention
For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Janet Frame
- Good
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 that help could neither be accepted nor understood.

Janet Frame
- Time
- Help
Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.

Janet Frame
- Wind
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
- Live
- Lost
- Nice

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 toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.

Janet Frame
- Light
- Air
- Memories
They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.

Janet Frame