Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

“I remembered only the good and loveable things about him, not the wretchedness he caused me, and the dope, and the resentments…

— Helen Garner

I tell you one thing that makes me feel I haven't wasted my life, and that is I've got some grandchildren. You…

— Helen Garner

I used to feel an obligation to invent things. I felt I was a failure because I didn't do massive great novels…

— Helen Garner

“How on earth could he not see it? It stood on the wooden floor behind him, in the corner just inside the…

— Helen Garner

There's only one thing I know what to do, so I'm pretty much otherwise unemployable. The idea that you can make a…

— 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…

— Helen Garner

I don't understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will.

— Helen Garner

“It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.”

— Helen Garner

“Do we identify with a criminal in that we too secretly long to be judged? Popularly, being ‘judgemental’ is ill thought of…

— Helen Garner

“I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I…

— Helen Garner

“judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.”

— Helen Garner

I think writers are very anxious.

— 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

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

— Helen Garner

I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.

— Helen Garner

But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me…

— Helen Garner

As in all matters involving love, which has so many different meanings, you find that the feeling that we label 'love' is…

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed…

— Helen Garner

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank…

— Helen Garner

“Ray kept well away from the shed. He hated the loony gestures of the furniture, its bossiness, the way Maxine would shape…

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

That's the best thing that's ever happened to me, bar none, is having grandchildren and living by them and being part of…

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner