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Faces in the Water QUOTES

Faces in the Water QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction. "

― Janet Frame , Faces in the Water

5 " 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

6 " Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others. "

― Janet Frame , Faces in the Water

7 " ..."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

8 " [...] 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " For your own good’ is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction. "

― Janet Frame , Faces in the Water

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " 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