Time & Perspective Quote by Janet Frame

“Abnormal” lands here like a correction and an indictment. Frame takes a polite, ostensibly clinical word - “special,” “different,” whatever euphemism was in vogue - and yanks the curtain back to show what it was doing: giving ordinary people permission to stop caring. The line’s sting isn’t just that the label is cruel. It’s that the label is useful.

“Divisions of the kind were fashionable” makes prejudice sound like an accessory, a social trend worn to signal modernity. Frame is writing out of a 20th-century world that loved categories: sane/insane, normal/abnormal, fit/unfit, often backed by institutions that claimed expertise while practicing containment. She doesn’t need to name asylums or diagnoses to summon that machinery; “divisions” does the work, bureaucratic and bloodless.

The real target is the moral loophole in the second clause. “So easy to stifle one's need to help” assumes the need is there first - an impulse toward care that most people would rather believe they possess. Frame’s insight is how quickly that impulse can be smothered by a story we tell ourselves: they won’t accept it, they won’t understand it. That’s not empathy; it’s preemptive absolution. You get to feel humane while doing nothing.

The sentence is engineered as a slow trap: an observation about language turns into a portrait of complicity. Frame’s intent isn’t merely to mourn the mislabeled; it’s to show how labeling protects the labeler.