Helen Garner quotes

" 'Didn't this used to be our dining-room table back at Sutherland Street, Frank?' said Kathleen. " # Food and Eating # Frankness # Punctuality

" '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.' " # Advice # Politicians and Politics # Love

" 'What's funny?' said Pin, shifting uncomfortably in the hospital bed. " # Hospitals # Humor # Life and Living

" Revolution begins in the kitchen. " # Revolutions and Revolutionaries # Friends and Friendship # Servants

" 'In my profession I have learned that women can bear more pain than men.' " # Pain # Men and Women # Learning

" 'Course I care. I always care. But there's no point in making a song and dance about it, like that night he stayed here. Know something? There's only one thing that'll bring 'em back, and that's indifference. The one thing you can't fake.' " # Aid and Assistance # Love # Dance and Dancing

" 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. " # Skepticism # Age and Aging # Writers and Writing

" '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.' " # Friends and Friendship # Love # Memory

" 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 " # Life and Living # Love # Politicians and Politics

" '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.' " # Family # Love # Death and Dying