Air Quote by Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

— Helen Garner

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

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

“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

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

— Helen Garner