Quote

Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful place where we may meet Job and hear his cry, 'How long will you vex my soul and break me in pieces with words?

Janet Frame

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Janet Frame
Age: 79 †
Born: 1924
Born: August 28
Died: 2004
Died: January 29
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dunedin
New Zealand
Janet Paterson Frame
Janet Paterson Frame Clutha
Janet Frame Clutha
May
Secret
Original
Mournful
Soul
Word
Angel
Maze
Giving
Words
Cry
Mazes
Long
Language
Meet
Monster
Life
Jobs
Pieces
Secrets
Death
Hear
Leading
Place
Least
Monsters
Give
Break
Originals
Vex

More quotes by Janet Frame

Image
The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge), but simply written it's a dreadful, awful fact that writing is like any other work.
Janet Frame
Image
All writers - all beings - are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.
Janet Frame
Image
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
Image
The sooner you 'settle' the sooner you'll be allowed home was the ruling logic and if you can't adapt yourself to living in a mental hospital how do you expect to be able to live 'out in the world'? How indeed?
Janet Frame
Image
I don't wish to inhabit the human world under false pretences.
Janet Frame
Image
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
Image
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
Image
They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.
Janet Frame
Image
I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.
Janet Frame
Image
For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.
Janet Frame
Image
Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.
Janet Frame
Image
when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?
Janet Frame
Image
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
Image
Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.
Janet Frame
Image
Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.
Janet Frame
Image
All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.
Janet Frame
Image
I like to see life with its teeth out.
Janet Frame
Image
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
Image
It is always hard to believe that the will to change something does not produce an immediate change.
Janet Frame
Image
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