When she spoke, French or English, she spoke slowly, almost mechanically, with a swaying motion of her body as if she had within her some instrument for winding her words, in sentence-containers, up from a great depth where they had fallen or been banished; sometimes one felt as if they were extracted with difficulty, as if she herself had gone away down into the rock to hack them out and shake them clean—a long slow process which made her listeners impatient: usually Max or Michael took over the telling of a long story when the words appeared to fit it appeared to be growing scarce.
Source: In The Memorial Room by Janet Frame »
Tagged in: memory
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