Janet Frame
Janet Frame
Nene Janet Paterson Clutha ONZ CBEwas 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...
NationalityNew Zealander
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 August 1924
mistake paper toilets
Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.
regret mean successful
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.
eye writing giving
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.
character thinking world
...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...
glasses flames sky
[...] a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun [...] rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass. And the people: giant pathworks of colour with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern.
morning mean hands
Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.
I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.
accepted deciding divisions meant neither nor stifle
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.
contains developing looking memory might others outward view within
My memory of myself contains now myself looking outward and myself looking within from without, developing the view that others might have of me.
fear reflection people
People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when people stare too close to silence they sometimes face their own reflections, their magnified shadows in the depths, and that frightens them. I know; I know.
writing years land
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.
fall writing ego
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.
freedom men libertarian
For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
writing journey land
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..