When our thoughts revolve we ...

When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation.
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 Janet Frame

Quotes from the same author

The sooner you 'settle' the sooner you'll be allowed home" was the ruling logic; and "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?
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 Janet Frame
Death is a dramatic accomplishment of absence; language may be almost as effective.
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 Janet Frame
I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.
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 Janet Frame
Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.
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 Janet Frame
The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.
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 Janet Frame