Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work. — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
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… — Helen Garner Copy Share
To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
“But I’ve been reading A Very Easy Death, about Simone de Beauvoir’s mother dying of cancer – it’s just brilliant. It really helped me.’… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
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… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
I just... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
“I realised I had a stream of thoughts about him which ran for the most part below conscious level. I noticed jets spurting up… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
“It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.” — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
