Faces in the Water Quotes

“For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks of a stream, catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb and turns quickly away, refusing to help or to search for help. 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 or help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighborhood of light we see our own face.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“..."if you can't adapt yourself to living in a mental hospital how do you expect to be able to live 'out in the world'?" How indeed?”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“[...] 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.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the giant unreality.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“I will write about the season of peril. I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world, drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where hammerhead sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears. I was alone on the ice.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sunlight as they lie embedded in the wall, are mistaken for jewels.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“we are herded to bed and the day’s thin scenery topples revealing, for those who sleep, the painted props of sleep. The rest lie in the dark and wait for morning and hope, against certain belief, that what the voices tell them is not true.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“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.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“I did not know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of straw.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“We stood at the gate, considering the marvel of the World where people, such is the deception of memory, did as they pleased, owned furniture, dressing tables with doilies on them and wardrobes with mirrors; and doors they could open and shut and open as many times as they chose; and no name tapes sewn inside the neck of their clothes; and handbags to carry, with nail files and make-up; and no one to watch while they were eating and to collect and count the knives afterwards and say in a frightening voice, ‘Rise, Ladies.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“When such a writer is at the height of her powers, everything seems significant; the merest everyday object becomes freighted with symbolic value and drenched in a strange kind of beauty. This is how writers and visual artists glimpse the latent value in everyday things. Objects transform before their eyes and reveal their true nature; the world unpeels itself. Meaning proliferates, so that to write a sentence is to touch on, allude to, all the possibilities of other sentences allied to it. The world takes on a heightened poignancy, which then destabilises emotion. This is the essence of the artist’s work.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“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.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“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.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“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.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“I know that the linen room was very often my sanctuary. I looked through its little dusty window upon the lower park and the lawns and trees and the distant blue strip of sea like sticky paper pasted edge to edge with the sky.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“Tenía frío. Traté de encontrar un par de calcetines largos de lana que mantuvieran mis pies calientes para no morir con el nuevo tratamiento, la terapia por electroshock, y evitar que hicieran desaparecer mi cuerpo por la puerta trasera para llevarlo al depósito de cadáveres.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“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)”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“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.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“I think it is the removal of the sun’s influence that has made us mad; the sun is blocked that used years ago to scrape the unreal shadow from our brain. So I always make a field, and I plant sunflowers, and their shadows move gently in the snow, and I pick up the pieces of dull stones that once were thoughts in precipitate flight in a friction of fire, like shooting stars in the sky.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“For your own good’ is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“At first her prose may seem a luxuriant unpruned Eden. But soon the reader sees the careful gardening, the astute nurture of what nature provides. Frame’s inner geography is complex, her psyche contains elaborate structures. She had the artist’s ability to make strange associations and imaginative leaps;”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“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.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“grip and focus beyond the powers of many of those who have spent a lifetime without their sanity being examined or questioned.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water