Helen Garner quotes

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)
It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.
Helen Garner
I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.
Helen Garner
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
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
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
I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.
Helen Garner
But there are some wounds that can never be healed.
Helen Garner
We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.
Helen Garner
That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.
Helen Garner
Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions. (Helen Garner)
Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.
Helen Garner
But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.
Helen Garner
I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.
Helen Garner
The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.
Helen Garner
At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.
Helen Garner
I think writers are very anxious.
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
People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.
Helen Garner
I like poking my nose into other people's lives.
Helen Garner
It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth. (Helen Garner)
But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.
Helen Garner
As in all matters involving love, which has so many different meanings, you find that the feeling that we label 'love' is not a simple feeling, it's a very complex one. Under the heading 'love' can come all sorts of rage and desperation.
Helen Garner
In my profession I have learned that women can bear more pain than men.' 'Are you a doctor, sir?
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