Time & Perspective Quote by Janet Frame

Fashion, Frame implies, is not just about hemlines or slang; it is a socially approved way to launder cruelty. Her target is the tidy taxonomy that lets people feel principled while doing nothing: those “divisions” that sort the world into the helpable and the hopeless, the deserving and the opaque. Calling them “fashionable” is the knife twist. If a moral posture can be trendy, it can also be worn lightly, swapped out, and used to signal belonging rather than responsibility.

The sentence does its work through a double exposure. On the surface, it describes a period-specific habit of mind. Underneath, it stages a universal excuse mechanism: the ease of “stifling” an internal impulse to act. Frame makes “need to help” sound bodily, almost involuntary, then shows how quickly the intellect can gag it. The verb choice matters: we don’t weigh or debate our compassion; we smother it.

The most damning move is the self-protective logic she quotes without quotation marks: deciding help “could neither be accepted nor understood.” It’s the perfect alibi because it pre-emptively closes the loop. If the other person won’t accept it, you’re spared rejection; if they can’t understand it, you’re spared the work of communicating, listening, or being changed by what you hear. It’s empathy turned into a managerial problem, solved by retreat.

Frame wrote from a life acutely aware of institutions, stigma, and the ways society invents categories to keep suffering at a hygienic distance. The line is less a memory than a warning: every era has its fashionable divisions, and they always arrive offering relief from the inconvenience of care.