Top 50 Janet Frame Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Janet Frame

2. “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 death. Wherever I turn – the golden cymbals of judgement, the summoning of the torturers of light.”

— Janet Frame

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

— Janet Frame

4. “It is always hard to believe that the will to change something does not produce an immediate change.”

— Janet Frame

5. “I like to see life with its teeth out.”

— Janet Frame

6. “For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.”

— Janet Frame

7. “I must go down to the seas again to find where I buried the hatchet with Yesterday.”

— Janet Frame

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

— Janet Frame

9. “I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.”

— Janet Frame

10. “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 does not include the shipwrecked people who arrive by devious lonely routes, and the many who dwell in the land in the beginning.”

— Janet Frame

11. “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

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

— Janet Frame

13. “Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sunlight as they lie embedded in the wall, are mistaken for jewels.”

— Janet Frame

14. “Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.”

— Janet Frame

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

— Janet Frame

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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 not choose or direct or destroy the powerful flow of possibility.”

— Janet Frame

19. “The day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem, drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe. And the place grows bean flower, pea-green lush of grass, swarm of insects dizzily hitting the high spots; dunny rosette creeping covering shawl ream in a knitted cosy of roses; ah the tipsy wee small hours of insects that jive upon the crippled grass blades and the face of the first flower alive.”

— Janet Frame

20. “All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land...”

— Janet Frame

21. “Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye.”

— Janet Frame

22. “Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.”

— Janet Frame

23. “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

24. “Ug-g-Ug. Ohhh Ohh g. Ugg.”

— Janet Frame

25. “I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.”

— Janet Frame

26. “Life is hell, but there are prizes.”

— Janet Frame

27. “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 as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind.”

— Janet Frame

28. “So I went up north to a land of palm trees and mangroves like malignant growths in the mud-filled throats of the bays, and orange trees with their leaves accepting darkly and seriously, in their own house as it were, the unwarranted globular outbursts of winter flame; and the sky faultless and remote.”

— Janet Frame

29. “Death is a dramatic accomplishment of absence; language may be almost as effective.”

— Janet Frame

30. “And at times I murmured the token phrase to the doctor, ‘When can I go home?’ knowing that home was the place where I least desired to be. There they would watch me for signs of abnormality, like ferrets around a rabbit burrow waiting for the rabbit to appear.”

— Janet Frame

31. “I don’t want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.”

— Janet Frame

32. “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 will keep us safe from human onslaught, will express for us our regret at being unable to supply groceries or love or peace.”

— Janet Frame

33. “She was so unused to conversation in the accepted sense that most of her spoken words were almost meaningless. They were a gesture, like that of a hostess arranging loose covers on the furniture of her room in order to assure herself that everything was prepared for her guests.”

— Janet Frame

34. “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 to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.”

— Janet Frame

35. “I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the giant unreality.”

— Janet Frame

36. “And poor Noeline, who was waiting for Dr. Howell to propose to her although the only words he had even spoken to her were How are you? Do you know where you are? Do you know why you are here? – phrases which ordinarily would be hard to interpret as evidence of affection. But when you are sick you find yourself a new field of perception where you make a harvest of interpretations which then provide you with your daily bread, your only food.”

— Janet Frame

37. “The fact is, very few of us are real imposters. And it’s different from play-acting. Imposterism or imposture comes from the core of your being because there’s nothing else there. Your central being never develops a self; that’s not a disadvantage, entirely, though you do have to fight for your point of view, almost as if you were dead.”

— Janet Frame

38. “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 of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.”

— Janet Frame

39. “Quick, where is the Red Cross God with the ointment and plaster the needle and thread and the clean linen bandages to mummify our festering dreams?”

— Janet Frame

40. “They think I’m going to be a schoolteacher but I’m going to be a poet.”

— Janet Frame

41. “I was baffled by my fuzzy hair and the attention it drew, and the urgency with which people advised that I have it ‘straightened’, as if it posed a threat.”

— Janet Frame

42. “People do not cry because it is the end. They cry because the end does not correspond with their imagination of it. Their first choice is always their own imagining; they refuse to be deterred by warnings. They say I choose this because although the price is high the thing itself is more precious, durable and beautiful. The light of imagined events is always so arranged that the customers do not see the flaws in what they have chosen to buy with their dreams.”

— Janet Frame

43. “I went towards the stairs, just as the band was playing ‘Now is the Hour’, and the music reached down like a long spoon inside me and stirred, and stirred.”

— Janet Frame

44. “I did not know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of straw.”

— Janet Frame

45. “I know there is a moment when sound slips down the torn lining of itself into silence, is carried unheard and secret in its own pocket. But the crimson birds could find no such escape, no means of slipping beyond themselves between the cracks of color and song to a white undiscovered silence.”

— Janet Frame

46. “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

47. “We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget nor help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighbourhood of light we see our own face.”

— Janet Frame

48. “I’m not there, she thought. I’m not there. I’m nowhere. She felt the world go dark with sudden exclusion and she was beating her wings against the door of the dark but no one opened the door; indeed, no one heard.”

— Janet Frame

49. “And so passed one morning and every morning and day but the people growing gentle and together, like old bulbs without promise of bloom, thrown to the rubbish heap and sinking in the filth and blindness to sprout a seperate community of dark, touching tendril and root to yet invisible colour of maimed flowers, narcissus, daffodil, tulip, and crocus-leaf stained with blade of snow.”

— Janet Frame

50. “Distance looks our way; the godwits vanish towards another summer and none knows where he will lie down at night.”

— Janet Frame