Helen Garner Quotes

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

When, in the street, I see a mother walking with her grown-up daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mother’s pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted her daughter’s company; and the iron discipline she imposes on herself, to muffle and conceal this joy.

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

Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for.

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.

my parents, for the hurt, helpless, angry love they must have felt as they watched me smash my way out of their protection.

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

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.

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.

...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'.

But the examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life. Although I have faced them many times and cast them down and made them bite the dust, yet they rise again and menace me with pale looks, until like Bob Acres I feel my courage oozing out at my finger ends. The days before these ordeals take place are spent in cramming your mind with mystic formula and indigestible dates—unpalatable diets, until you wish that books and science and you were buried in the depths of the sea. At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch.

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

Ray kept well away from the shed. He hated the loony gestures of the furniture, its bossiness, the way Maxine would shape a table to enclose the sitter at it, trapping him like a baby in a high chair or a school boy at his inkwell.

I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.

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’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.

Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: ‘So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.

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?

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

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.

How on earth could he not see it? It stood on the wooden floor behind him, in the corner just inside the door, where the light from the hallway poorly fell: an old-fashioned alarm clock with three blunt stumps for legs and a bell like a Prussian helmet. Its face, a faithful little moon, was turned up to her, its hands were spread to plead innocence, and its inner mechanism emitted without ceasing the rapid ribbon of blows called the passing of time.

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.

Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet not a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them. Hilary Mantel

You'd die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you'd written. Somebody somewhere says that 'the urge to preserve is the basis of all art'. Unaware of this thought, you keep a diary. You keep it not only because it gratifies your urge to sling words around, everyday with impunity, but because without it, you will lose your life, ts detail will leak away into the sand and be gone forever.

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.

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'.

From now until the end of the trial, every time [the jury] entered the court, Farquharson would spring to his feet in the dock and remain standing until they were seated—a protocol that seemed to say my fate is in your hands.

The beginner will cling and cling to her thin first draft. She clings to the coast and will strike out into the ocean only under extreme duress

It came to me that to turn the other cheek, as he had done, was not simply to apply an ancient Christian precept but also to engage in a highly sophisticated psychological maneuver. 216

I had been working there for several months [in New York], in that climate of intellectual openness which is so astonishing to an Australian...

Hour after hour, while cop and counsel danced like medieval angels upon the head of a pin, I grew stupider and stupider.

I thought about the patterns I make in my life: loving the wrong person, loving not enough and too much and too long.

He was a lean, contained-looking man, with a clipped grey beard and a mouth that cut across his face on a severe slant, like that of someone who spent his days listening to bullshit.

I stared at my reflection in the dark window: bumpy head, wide forehead, small mouth held tightly with fear, skin spotty from speed and coffee, eyes drooping outwards at the outer corners. I felt small, tight, and ugly. I looked as desperate as I felt. I felt that he didn't like me, that he was wishing we hadn't come. Did I wish that? I watched him reading his newspaper. I had seen how pale his face was at the airport. I was frightened. I was afraid of his moods. I was afraid of my own. I was afraid of being afraid.

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.’ She

The first time I ever got into bed with a girl, starkers,’ says V, ‘I was staggered by the softness. I was absolutely staggered.’ I thought about the three women I’ve been in bed with. The astounding softness of their mouths and skin. I decide not to say, ‘I know exactly what you mean.

Kookaburras burst out in choruses from the gully. A full moon rises. P surveys it from the veranda couch, sitting yoga-style with her elbows propped gracefully on her knees. I have known her so long that I don’t know any more where I end and she begins. I have been friends with her more than half my life on earth.

P is very exercised domestically by what you me are minor matters: which kitchen table? She ways this possibility against that, trotting from one room to another or standing in a thoughtful posture, finger against cheek. I adopt a good-humoured but blanked-out patience, like a man in a Maupassant short story with a garrulous wife whom he nonetheless loves. P is adorable, but faithful, with a delicacy that I completely lack.

Francis stayed with me and was patiently kind to me; but when we were fucking I began to cry again out of weakness and fear that he was fucking me, as a man does to a woman or out of fear that I liked it. I couldn’t find his mind, or his heart; he was away in his own travelling.

I sat down opposite him. He looked up, straight into my eyes as he does, and smiled at me. At that moment, we were both a hundred years old and we had known each other for ever.

If he had been a monster, I wouldn’t have been interested in writing about him. The sorts of crimes that interest me are not the ones committed by psychopaths. I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life’s unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.

... this is love. Everything is spoken, nothing is said.

... have you ever watched someone you know front their own reflection in a mirror? ... You see a stiffening, a closing, a dimming; you see them pull on their own idea of themselves, the caricature that will soften and melt away the minute they think of something other than the enemy before them.

I want to be the one doing the looking. I have developed a whole social demeanour with the aim of deflecting attention from my appearance, I actively dislike being looked at.

Maybe that's what beauty is: loving being looked at. The beautiful are greedy.

We've been trained in your tradition,' said Natalie. 'We're honorary men.

I knew that I was in despair. The house was empty, too big for me to fill. All I could bring to it was an enormous, slow, bleak loneliness. In a junk shop I found a shabby but surprisingly comfortable old sofa covered in gold brocade that was bleached almost to silver. When it was delivered I saw only its dated gentility; but then I tossed an equally ancient pink silk cushion on to it, and the pink and faded gold sang to each other in quiet, tired voices. I saw that, living alone, one must play out one's domestic dramas through inanimate objects. Suddenly this did not seem so terrible.

sometimes, we touch each other. No one else gets that close to me. He behaves

Memo: do not drink coffee. It makes me uselessly nervy, even trembly, and engenders baseless optimism about my powers of creation.