Janet Frame Quotes

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

I wanted to be as far away from everybody as I could be. I found it difficult to be close to anybody, not just the guys in the band.

I will not bond. I will not share. I refuse to nurture.

I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than--broken down.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

He's worked his entire life and he's never lived a single moment, I mean not a moment, in the real world.

A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.

The hard part about SNL is, there's no real communication when you get there. It's not like people are mean to you, they just act like you're not there.

Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.

The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.

There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.

I don't belong. Not here. Not now. I have to get back there. The bet was rigged, he made me believe. Now there's darkness in my soul. I want to die . . . again. But I choose to come back, why?

By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.

Everyone has to understand what we're saying to one another and there's no point in me thinking the line means this and the person I'm speaking to thinks it means something else. So there's a certain amount of analyzing of text that's of course necessary.

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?

It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.

It is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obsesses the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into innumerable and inane controversies and fancies.

Be respectful of words. They mean something.

You're being mean to someone who's helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.

I speak the truth but I guess that's a foreign language to ya'll!

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.