Everywhere I Look Quotes

“When, in the street, I see a mother walking with her grown-up daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mother’s pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted her daughter’s company; and the iron discipline she imposes on herself, to muffle and conceal this joy.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“my parents, for the hurt, helpless, angry love they must have felt as they watched me smash my way out of their protection.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: ‘So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet not a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them. Hilary Mantel”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“If he had been a monster, I wouldn’t have been interested in writing about him. The sorts of crimes that interest me are not the ones committed by psychopaths. I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life’s unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“It came to me that to turn the other cheek, as he had done, was not simply to apply an ancient Christian precept but also to engage in a highly sophisticated psychological maneuver. 216”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look

“I knew that I was in despair. The house was empty, too big for me to fill. All I could bring to it was an enormous, slow, bleak loneliness.
In a junk shop I found a shabby but surprisingly comfortable old sofa covered in gold brocade that was bleached almost to silver. When it was delivered I saw only its dated gentility; but then I tossed an equally ancient pink silk cushion on to it, and the pink and faded gold sang to each other in quiet, tired voices. I saw that, living alone, one must play out one's domestic dramas through inanimate objects. Suddenly this did not seem so terrible.”
― Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look