Helen Garner > Quotes

“I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room

“When, in the street, I see a mother walking with her grown-up daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mother’s pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted her daughter’s company; and the iron discipline she imposes on herself, to muffle and conceal this joy.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room

“Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“I remembered only the good and loveable things about him, not the wretchedness he caused me, and the dope, and the resentments and silence and the half-crazy outbursts. I remembered his smell and the colour of his eyes and his head thrown back to laugh; these things were a second away, in time, but the others I dredged up dutifully, knowing that I must, for the sake of truth and sanity, try to keep a balance.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“Invisible magpies warbled in the plane trees. Softly, gently, never running out of melodic ideas, they perched among the leaves and spun out their endless tales.”
― Helen Garner, Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law

“...as if, one lover gone, I was opening up for an immediate replacement. Smack habit, love habit - what's the difference? They can both kill you. For the bus journey I fell in love with a woman who smiled at me. The motion of the bus made her thick mop of fair curls tremble. We talked about desperados.

'I am fatally attracted to them', I said. 'In fact, I probably am one'.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“my parents, for the hurt, helpless, angry love they must have felt as they watched me smash my way out of their protection.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.”
― Helen Garner, This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

“I saw the bumpy shape of my skull, I saw myself shorn and revealed. I wandered in a dream around the city, glimpsing in shop windows a strange creature with my face.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“Do we identify with a criminal in that we too secretly long to be judged? Popularly, being ‘judgemental’ is ill thought of and resented. But what if we want our deeds, our natures, our very souls to be summed up and evaluated? A line to be drawn under our acts to date? A punishment declared, amends made, the slate wiped clean? A born-again Christian, trying to explain his new sense of freedom, once said to me, "All my debts are paid".”
― Helen Garner, Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law

“I’ve seen the way she comes on to him—I just can’t stand it. You know—what really shits me is how you spend years working on yourself to get rid of all that stupid eyelash-fluttering and giggling, and then just when you think you’re getting somewhere, you find out that guys still like women who do that sort of thing. I watch ‘em fall for it, every time.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room

“Ray kept well away from the shed. He hated the loony gestures of the furniture, its bossiness, the way Maxine would shape a table to enclose the sitter at it, trapping him like a baby in a high chair or a school boy at his inkwell.”
― Helen Garner, Cosmo Cosmolino

“I thought about the patterns I make in my life: loving the wrong person, loving not enough and too much and too long.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.”
― Helen Garner, This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

“I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.”
― Helen Garner

“How on earth could he not see it? It stood on the wooden floor behind him, in the corner just inside the door, where the light from the hallway poorly fell: an old-fashioned alarm clock with three blunt stumps for legs and a bell like a Prussian helmet. Its face, a faithful little moon, was turned up to her, its hands were spread to plead innocence, and its inner mechanism emitted without ceasing the rapid ribbon of blows called the passing of time.”
― Helen Garner, Cosmo Cosmolino

“I realised I had a stream of thoughts about him which ran for the most part below conscious level. I noticed jets spurting up from this stream: comparisons with other relationships I knew of which had weathered massive changes and shifts of balance; small crumbs of hope he would find he missed the familiarity of my company, or that his gestures of comfort meant more than a gentle goodbye. I grieved for these hopes, and their hopelessness.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“Memo: do not drink coffee. It makes me uselessly nervy, even trembly, and engenders baseless optimism about my powers of creation.”
― Helen Garner, Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978–1986

“I sat down opposite him. He looked up, straight into my eyes as he does, and smiled at me. At that moment, we were both a hundred years old and we had known each other for ever.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“Such was my elation that I ran inside, put on our ancient cracked record of Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ and danced all by myself for half an hour in our living room, without inhibition, almost crying with jubilation—not just about the wood, but because I could live competently some of the time, and because that day I liked myself.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip: A Novel

“Hunger’s like a disease: it has to be tended.’ So is loneliness.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip: A Novel

“No touching, he won’t touch me, he won’t allow me his body. But, as usual when I was being of service, he cheerfully accepted an omelette and a cup of coffee when I made lunch for everyone.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip: A Novel

“I want to be the one doing the looking. I have developed a whole social demeanour with the aim of deflecting attention from my appearance, I actively dislike being looked at.”
― Helen Garner, Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

“The two big cities of Australia are tonally as distinct from each other as Boston is from L.A. or Lyon from Marseilles.”
― 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 does psychological sophistication override a sense that some actions are just plain bad? How much of human behaviour, in the end, can one understand?”
― Helen Garner

“Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet not a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them. Hilary Mantel”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look