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"But there are some wounds that can never be healed."
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"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of."
"His mouth would have given despair to even the drollest of fools; it was a mouth made for frowns and scowls and sharply worded commands, all thin pale lips and clenched muscles, a mouth that had forgotten how to smile and had never known how to laugh."
"She [Mme Sazerat] did not offer her hand, but smiled at my mother with vague melancholy as one smiles at a playmate from one's childhood, but with whom all connection has been severed because she has lived a debauched life, married a jailbird or, worse still, a divorced man."
"Yes, looking through the eyes of literature we may talk about the beauty of sadness! But in the eyes of truth, sadness is just saddening; there is no beauty there, only a touching desperation!"
"Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future."
"Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels."
Explore more quotes by Helen Garner
"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."
"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."
"That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground."
"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."
"At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society."
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