Top 30 Helen Garner Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Helen Garner

2. “The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.”

— Helen Garner

3. “But there are some wounds that can never be healed.”

— Helen Garner

4. “On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels.”

— Helen Garner

5. “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.”

— Helen Garner

6. “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 to calm themselves.”

— Helen Garner

7. “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 I’m established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.”

— Helen Garner

8. “And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.”

— Helen Garner

9. “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.”

— Helen Garner

10. “I like poking my nose into other people’s lives.”

— Helen Garner

11. “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.”

— Helen Garner

12. “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”.”

— Helen Garner

13. “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.”

— Helen Garner

14. “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.”

— Helen Garner

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15. “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.”

— Helen Garner

16. “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.”

— Helen Garner

17. “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.”

— Helen Garner

18. “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.”

— Helen Garner

19. “Now, I – for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.”

— Helen Garner

20. “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 share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I’m doing it completely intellectually.”

— Helen Garner

21. “People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can’t deliver.”

— Helen Garner

22. “I’m very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.”

— Helen Garner

23. “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.”

— Helen Garner

24. “It’s a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else’s life.”

— Helen Garner

25. “The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.”

— Helen Garner

26. “That’s one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.”

— Helen Garner

27. “I think writers are very anxious.”

— Helen Garner

28. “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?”

— Helen Garner

29. “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.”

— Helen Garner

30. “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.”

— Helen Garner

31. “At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.”

— Helen Garner

32. “I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.”

— Helen Garner