Janet Frame quotes
March 21st 2011 00:14
Janet Frame was a
New Zealand author whose books have only occasionally struck a chord with me. Living in the Maniototo, for instance, turned out to have some wildly funny writing in it - humour isn't something I'd have associated with Frame - and her three-volume Autobiography was more than just a picture of a person's life; it encompassed views of cities (including my own) and of writing, and of the joys and difficulties of being alive.
The following five quotes are from her autobiography, which was originally issued in three separate parts (To the Is-land, An Angel at my Table and The Envoy from Mirror City), but, by the time I came to read it, was under one cover.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 11
Mrs K had absorbed some of the Central Otago hill formation into her own body. Like her sister, Aunty Han, she had a mouth and lips prepared to register instant disapproval. Dad used to say that Aunty Han's mouth was like the behind of an egg-bound hen.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 25
I was slightly nervous, however, of Miss Lincoln, for she had announced soon after our meeting that she always 'said honestly what she thought.' Although I value honesty, I am sometimes fearful of the sharpness, the hint of aggression with which it is expressed.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part III - chapter 10
I felt that the link between the world of living and of writing resembled a high wire needing intense relaxed concentration for the barefoot journey (on knives or featherbeds) between. In such a life the presence of others is a resented intrusion and becomes a welcome joyous diversion only when the attention must be directed away from words, if only briefly, during times of travel and sickness.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 15
[On a psychiatrist]. I was grateful to have as my doctor someone who was not afraid to acknowledge and voice the awful though that he belonged, after all, to the human race, that there was nothing he could do about it, and pretending to be a god would never change it.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part III - chapter 17
In my struggle to get my writing done I realised the obvious fact that the only certainty about writing and trying to be a write 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 dreary awful fact that writing is like any other work with the marvellous exception of the presence of the Mirror City and the constant journeys either of oneself or of the Envoy from Mirror City.
22nd March, 2011 PS...in one of the comments below, Anonymous has mentioned Frame's resemblance to the Canadian trumpeter, Maynard Ferguson....I guess there's a certain resemblance!
Photo courtesy of Jazz Times
The following five quotes are from her autobiography, which was originally issued in three separate parts (To the Is-land, An Angel at my Table and The Envoy from Mirror City), but, by the time I came to read it, was under one cover.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 11
Mrs K had absorbed some of the Central Otago hill formation into her own body. Like her sister, Aunty Han, she had a mouth and lips prepared to register instant disapproval. Dad used to say that Aunty Han's mouth was like the behind of an egg-bound hen.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 25
I was slightly nervous, however, of Miss Lincoln, for she had announced soon after our meeting that she always 'said honestly what she thought.' Although I value honesty, I am sometimes fearful of the sharpness, the hint of aggression with which it is expressed.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part III - chapter 10
I felt that the link between the world of living and of writing resembled a high wire needing intense relaxed concentration for the barefoot journey (on knives or featherbeds) between. In such a life the presence of others is a resented intrusion and becomes a welcome joyous diversion only when the attention must be directed away from words, if only briefly, during times of travel and sickness.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 15
[On a psychiatrist]. I was grateful to have as my doctor someone who was not afraid to acknowledge and voice the awful though that he belonged, after all, to the human race, that there was nothing he could do about it, and pretending to be a god would never change it.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part III - chapter 17
In my struggle to get my writing done I realised the obvious fact that the only certainty about writing and trying to be a write 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 dreary awful fact that writing is like any other work with the marvellous exception of the presence of the Mirror City and the constant journeys either of oneself or of the Envoy from Mirror City.
22nd March, 2011 PS...in one of the comments below, Anonymous has mentioned Frame's resemblance to the Canadian trumpeter, Maynard Ferguson....I guess there's a certain resemblance!
Photo courtesy of Jazz Times
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