FACES IN THE WATER - JANET FRAME

Faces in the Water - Pg 250

   I have never met a man who knew so many secrets; but although he behaved as if he had opened all the lucky packets of life he never disclosed what he really found in them and one suspects that it was only trinkets that broke when he touched them.

Faces in the Water - Pg 247

   Who are we, have we changed when we no longer claim as our treasure the stalk of grass in our hand or the chocolate paper but choose the human beings that we hope to hold tight in our heart? Are we sane then? Have we progressed from illness when we do not care any more for the pink cretonne bag with its pattern of roses, but begin to look for people that we may thread a drawstring round their neck and carry them back and forth inside ourselves, and not be willing to let them go not even in the night in sleep and dreams?

Faces in the Water - Pg 244

   Looking through the window I felt depressed and hopeless at the sameness of everything. Living is so much like one of those childhood games where you keep shutting your eyes and on opening them expect to find everything changed--anew city with glass towers, a table laden for a feast, a kindly forest where the trees no longer strike blows or twist themselves into fearful shapes.

Faces in the Water - Pg 241

   He sees the land of meaning, and one path to it, and the so-called "normal" people traveling swiftly and in comfort to the land; he does not include the shipwrecked people who arrive by devious lonely routes, and the many who dwell in the land in the beginning.

Faces in the Water - Pg 239

   The fact that there were notices demanding Silence when one would never have dreamed of speaking made it seem that the room contained secret presences which had to be controlled and which related in a strange way the death and painstaking reconstruction of the moa and the micelike letters that were wired with meaning and resurrected to make words, and placed in imposing attitudes on the pages of the books. So it was for her own protection that the librarian hid behind a grille and pinned notices on the wall; she had to make every effort to subdue more than the timid subscribers tiptoeing between the shelves.

Faces in the Water - Pg 230

   Time and again, with Doris and other dwarves and patients who resembled witches or seemed inhabited by dragons, one felt like a witness to the origins of folklore; one felt that such people, whose only home in the world was a mental hospital, would have their problem solved if they could indeed dwell in the cups of flowers or behind people's eyes, or in cottages deep in the wood with poisonous thorns in the garden and a one-eyed cat waiting at the front door.

Faces in the Water - Pg 230

   Her sewing was the neatest I have seen, like that of the legendary small people who climb at night into the flowers and embroider the petals or sit on stalks of grass knitting dewdrops, or the evil folk who creep in people's eyes and draw the curtains and furtively stitch tapestries with poisoned needle and thread or have their workroom in people's ears, tatting back and forth with their shuttle full of decibels.

Faces in the Water - Pg 226

   The brilliant whiteness increased until it could no longer bear its own intensity, when it changed suddenly to deadly black velvet, like love which overstrains itself into hate, or like the dark side of our nature which we meet most suddenly when we believe ourselves to be journeying farthest from it.

Faces in the Water - Pg 222

   They talked of the future as if it were something tangible and within reach, like a ripe pear hanging over the fence from a neighbor's garden, whereas I had known for so long now that the future had been attacked by worms that had crept into it and eaten its heart. Faith might be a good neighbor and hang fruit over the fence but something else was needed to wield the arsenic spray.

Faces in the Water - Pg 204

   I smelled the room, I went shopping among the smells--old urine mixed with misery for it was not the honest stench of babies not yet trained but a preserved and outcast adult smell of those who had known and been deprived of their knowing; the smell of stale polish, straw and straw dust, sunlessness; the smell of corners, of the wooden door that had been kicked and hammered upon for seventy years.

Faces in the Water - Pg 202

   I wrote to death; Dear Death, I said, formalizing our relationship, and the leavings of light wastefully spilled were strewn on the lawn and the park.

Faces in the Water - Pg 201

   Sun and shade are tricks and I trust nothing and I understand why we fear the telephone, why, although we have cut the cables, we still lift the receiver and wait for the voice we dread; and I understand mirrors and try to track the point in their depth when we become nothing.

Faces in the Water - Pg 189

   I waited patiently for him to perform a miracle... the face of the world stayed the same, the sick were not healed, the roof did not dissolve and let in the stars.
   Eric taught me to dance.

Faces in the Water - Pg 170

   Their minds were planets in their private sky and their behavior gave little evidence of their real night and day and the pull of their secret tides; their heavenly collisions storms floods droughts and seasons of strength.

Faces in the Water - Pg 159

   When you have been in hospital long enough you tend to lose the urgent need, taken for granted in the "outside world," to express disbelief; it seems pointless, even a presumption, to burst out with cries of "That's not true" when you realize that truth is the indestructible foundation of the foundation of the foundation and needs no defense anyway.

Faces in the Water - Pg 145

   Alice died in the night, in great pain. There was a comfort for us in knowing that the nurse on duty had a reputation for laying out the dead with care. They said she made Alice look beautiful; a touch of cotton wool here and there, her cheeks full and flushed and delicately made-up, her hands clasping fresh flowers. If one had known Alice only in the daytime as the prim hard-working maid of the ward, one would have thought that should she chance to wake and find herself wearing lipstick and rouge she would be shocked. But we had seen her in the night and heard her thrilling extravagant tales, and surely, we thought, no one would have been more pleased to spend the longest night of all transformed, though mildly, as a Jezebel.

Faces in the Water - Pg 139

   She had known many of the patients for years and was loved and trusted by them and her attitude was usually one of happy sarcasm where words which came from her as sarcasm and mockery, a habit which she had perhaps acquired when learning to impress and obey the dictatorial matron of years ago, seemed in the air to undergo a transformation, to be fused with her abundance of vitality and sympathy so that they arrived without seeming to hurt.

Faces in the Water - Pg 138

   She told me once, in a moment of confidence which she always regretted... after her first day on duty, she cried most of the night and resolved, though she never kept her resolution, to submit her resignation and leave the appalling place and become a nurse in a general hospital where the patients were not shamed and abused because of their illness and where you could at least see what was wrong with them and prepare a neat dressing with ointment and clean white bandages to soothe and heal, and with no difficulty keep the patient quietly trapped in bed. But here at Cliffhaven or any mental hospital you had to provide your own bandages from within yourself to bind wounds that could not be seen or measured, and at the same time it seemed you had to forget that the patients were people, for there were so many of them and there was so much to do. The remedy was to shout and hit and herd.

Faces in the Water - Pg 130

   I merely dreamed that a letter would come addressed to me, a love letter, that I would take it to my room and read it again and again and memorize it and pore over the handwriting and try to imitate it and change my own ink to green if the handwriting were in green ink. But who would write me a love letter?