73 Quotes by 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 always shouting, 'Go outside!' But she shouted it at all of us. I think I was just kind of... rather an introverted child, probably.

Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude, she lacked the detachment to challenge them.

I think one thing I've learned not to do from my experience with The First Stone was to pester somebody, to keep insisting that they speak to you.

I like to stand behind them and give support of the kind I didn't get when I was a young mother because I was estranged from my parents for a very long time.. So I don't know which way to go from here and it does seem a particularly female problem.

I think writers are very anxious.

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 crying with jubilation – not just about the wood, but because I could live competently some of the time, and because that day I liked myself.

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 happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

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 to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.

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 dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.