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21 " 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
22 " 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; "
23 " 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. "
24 " 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. "