Helen Garner Quotes

“What's funny?' said Pin, shifting uncomfortably in the hospital bed.
'I was looking at your mouth. It's exactly the same as mine.'
'Small and mean,' said Pin, whose devotion to the church did not damp her vulgar sense of humour. 'Wanna see a cat's bum?' She pursed her lips into a tight bunch. They snickered in the quiet ward.
'You'll never go to heaven,' said Kathleen. 'You're rude.”

“Out in deep space the planets sweep, inexorable, along their splendid orbits. Maxine bowed her head. From now on she would take the gods' dictation.”

“It's rather like a Poe story, isn't it,' said Patrick luxuriously, unfocusing his eyes. 'A person sees the chance of a better life passing by, and he makes as if to call out' - he flung one arm in the imploring gesture of a soul in torment - 'but something in his nature makes him hesitate. He pauses… he closes his lips… he steps back… and then he slides down, and down, and down.”

“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”

“He claims,' said Jenny tactfully, 'That he flew through a radioactive cloud thirty years ago and that it didn't do him any harm - thus it's all right to mine uranium. A fine piece of Australian political reasoning.”

“In my profession I have learned that women can bear more pain than men.'
'Are you a doctor, sir?”

“Revolution begins in the kitchen.”

“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.”

“Her handwriting in these pencilled jottings, made forty-five years ago, is exactly as it is today: this makes me suspect, when I am not with her, that she is a closet intellectual.”

“Our minds are not hopeful, thought Janet; but our nerves are made of optimistic stuff.”

“Crap,' said Janet. 'He was a whinger and he wrote it down. That's not poetry.”

“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.”

“Didn't this used to be our dining-room table back at Sutherland Street, Frank?' said Kathleen.
'Yep. Four dollars at the Anchorage, remember? That was when I cornered the market in cane chairs, too.'
'Come off it! We only had three.'
'Yes, but the price had doubled by the following Saturday.”

“That,' I said, 'would be a blessing. There are so many things I'd like to forget I hardly know what would be left standing, if I ever got started.”

“The devil's everywhere,' he said. 'Not just at Brunswick one day and somewhere else the next. He's everywhere.”