The Spare Room Quotes

“I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room

“Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room

“I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room

“Stress,' he said, 'is the biggest cause of cancer in our society. Stress makes us vulnerable to whatever nasties we have lurking in our beings.'

That wasn't so outlandish. My thoughts coasted sideways to my sister Madeleine, her relentless grief and rage when her husband drowned in the surf: how she wielded without mercy the manipulative power of her suffering. Ten years later an untreatable cancer was found in her lung. She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed in. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her. We nursed her. In less than a year, with her family near her, she put aside her knitting and died, in her own house, in the bed she had shared with her husband, while outside the window the shapely limbs of the trees they had planted together stood leafless in the late winter air.”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room

“anything to do with palliative.” “Why,” I said dully”
― Helen Garner, The Spare Room