Best 36 quotes of Helen Garner on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

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.

I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

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.

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.

I think writers are very anxious.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

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.

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.

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.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

Tentatively I stood a great lump of wood on the chopping block and bought the axe down on it. It flew into two perfect halves. 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.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.

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.

To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.

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.

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.

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.

...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'.

Australians used to love to joke about the awfulness of their capital city, its social bleakness, its provinciality, its grandiose, curvaceous street design in which the visitor strives in vain to orient himself. But because I had spent many happy student holidays in Canberra in the 1960s, as the guest of a family I was deeply fond of, I had always loved the place, found it beautiful with its cloudless skies and dry air, and looked forward to every visit; but now, with my new sombre purpose, it seemed to change its nature.

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?

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".

I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.

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.

I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.

Post-script: When my tutor got a famous scholarship and went to Oxford, he broke my heart, of course. I sobbed in cafés and hotel bars, bored my friends half to death, and thought myself tragically bereft. I cannot in all honesty claim to have been liberated from anything in particular by my relationship with this man. I hated his subject and was bad at it, failed it twice and did not care. He made me laugh, that's the main thing I remember. I often felt he was privately laughing at me, from the eminence of his twenty-four years. This made me watchful and defensive....it had never occurred to me to call what happened between me and my tutor 'sexual harassment' or 'abuse of power'.

The two big cities of Australia are tonally as distinct from each other as Boston is from L.A. or Lyon from Marseilles.