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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

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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
Medicine
Stockings
Sweet
Tablets
Went
Silk
Sleep
Wrapped
Small
Bricks
Wielded
Dream
Oblivion
Coated
Glasses
Assaulted
Bed
Dainty

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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?
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Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't wish to inhabit the human world under false pretences.
Janet Frame
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I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.
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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
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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.
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They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.
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Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.
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Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.
Janet Frame
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For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.
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I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what do you think of that? It was only a few minutes walk to trigger, then over the page to trinity, trinket and trional, and there my cousin used to fall asleep.
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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.
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I like to see life with its teeth out.
Janet Frame