Janet Frame Quotes

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

I have not thought too much about the psychology or life of the character Jonas in some time.

Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?

I've criticized myself over the years.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

I can see myself before myself - a being through dark scenery.

A person loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary, or journal.

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?

I'd discovered you never know yourself until you're tested and that you don't even know you're being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn't anyone giving the test except yourself.

Sometimes I have that kind of critical mind to myself as well. This is because there are times where I have to do things that I don't wish to.

No matter where you go, you always see yourself in the rearview mirror.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.

My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?

I turned myself to face me, but I've never caught a glimpse of how the others must see the faker.

Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?

I have never dissected my personal life. What sense would it make?