Quotes from Janet Frame

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ug-g-Ug. Ohhh Ohh g. Ugg.

The godwits vanish towards another summer. Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring Shadow of departure; distance looks our way; And none knows where he will lie down at night.

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

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.

And he felt so lonely so close up to the sky, not the rewarding and proud loneliness he had felt when driving the train at night across the plains, but an unforgiving and harsh emptiness, as if he had been rejected by earth and sky and must stay forever now in the between gulf, tired and afraid.

So I, a migratory bird, am suffering from the need to return to the place I have come from before the season and sun are right for my return. Do I meet spring summer or winter? Here I live in a perpetual other season unable to read in the sky, the sun, the temperature, the signs for returning.

A certain pleasure was added to Grace's relief at establishing herself as a migratory bird. She found that she understood the characters in her novel. Her words flowed, she was excited, she could see everyone and everything.

I matter. I fly lone, apart from the flock, on long journeys through storm and clear skies to another summer. Hear me!

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water. — Janet Frame, Faces in the Water . (The Women's Press Ltd December 31, 1985)

Supported by love, any tissue-paper identity may stand like stone.

Some days later Susan and I went to the city for an X-ray, and Susan was found to have tuberculosis, and was put in one of the small rooms down the corridor next to Margaret and to Eva who woke one morning, vomited, and died, and her mother, a small woman with bandy legs and wearing a grey coat, came to collect her things.

The dislike of her was general. I wonder now about the treatment of psychiatric and other patients who release, as if it were a chemical, an invitation to be disliked and who therefore have to fight (inducing further dislike and antagonism) for sympathy and fairness.

Grace thought, Perhaps I ought to comment on some news. Unfortunately Grace was one of those people who can become a bore and an irritation to others and an anguish to themselves because their lives are dominated by "ought". "What ought I to do? Do you think I ought to -"... They refuse to let a situation rest; they must tamper with it, adjust it, change it, impose upon it their immediate concern of "ought".

She needn't have worried. It was her mind he wanted to reach, and nobody , by conversation, could ever reach Grace's mind. Like the grave, it was a "private place", and could not be shared.

grip and focus beyond the powers of many of those who have spent a lifetime without their sanity being examined or questioned.

ECT is still used – in much more limited circumstances, but on the most vulnerable patients. It is still highly controversial. Its opponents say it is a licensed way of producing brain damage. Its proponents claim it saves deeply depressed patients from suicide. Doctor-led follow-up studies report on it much more favourably than patient-led studies. There is now general acceptance that it leads to memory loss, that this may be permanent and may be severe.