Helen Garner Quotes

23 quotes in 436 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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…
• It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.
• But there are some wounds that can never be healed.
• Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at…
• I like poking my nose into other people's lives.
• 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…
• At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.
• I think writers are very anxious.
• I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.
• 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.
• People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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