Helen Garner Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

I think writers are very anxious.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

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.

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

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

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.

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