Helen Garner Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

'It's rather like a Poe story, isn't it,' said Patrick luxuriously, unfocusing his eyes. 'A person sees the chance of a better life passing by, and he makes as if to call out' - he flung one arm in the imploring gesture of a soul in torment - 'but something in his nature makes him hesitate. He pauses... he closes his lips... he steps back... and then he slides down, and down, and down.'

Helen Garner
Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude, she lacked the detachment to challenge them.

Helen Garner
Her handwriting in these pencilled jottings, made forty-five years ago, is exactly as it is today: this makes me suspect, when I am not with her, that she is a closet intellectual.

Helen Garner
Out in deep space the planets sweep, inexorable, along their splendid orbits. Maxine bowed her head. From now on she would take the gods' dictation.

Helen Garner
'Crap,' said Janet. 'He was a whinger and he wrote it down. That's not poetry.'

Helen Garner
'That,' I said, 'would be a blessing. There are so many things I'd like to forget I hardly know what would be left standing, if I ever got started.'

Helen Garner
'Course I care. I always care. But there's no point in making a song and dance about it, like that night he stayed here. Know something? There's only one thing that'll bring 'em back, and that's indifference. The one thing you can't fake.'

Helen Garner
'Didn't this used to be our dining-room table back at Sutherland Street, Frank?' said Kathleen.

Helen Garner
The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Helen Garner
'What's funny?' said Pin, shifting uncomfortably in the hospital bed.

Helen Garner
I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

Helen Garner
Our minds are not hopeful, thought Janet; but our nerves are made of optimistic stuff.

Helen Garner
'The devil's everywhere,' he said. 'Not just at Brunswick one day and somewhere else the next. He's everywhere.'

Helen Garner
And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.

Helen Garner
'He claims,' said Jenny tactfully, 'That he flew through a radioactive cloud thirty years ago and that it didn't do him any harm - thus it's all right to mine uranium. A fine piece of Australian political reasoning.'

Helen Garner
On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels

Helen Garner
'In my profession I have learned that women can bear more pain than men.'

Helen Garner