Helen Garner

"Women fantasise about what we will do if a bloke blah blah blah - but when one does, a strange passivity can swarm through us. Is this really happening? Or am I being over-sensitive, as women are so often accused of being? Surely he'll stop in a minute. Surely he can tell I'm only being polite, that I'm not like it. How can he be completely unaware that I'm actually hating it?

Why isn't he reading my mind? "

The First Stone by Helen Garner
Picador, Sydney, 1995
Page 63-4

J.M. Coetzee

"Sometimes when he is among the sheep--when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away--he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of the long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it--the price of being on earth, the price of being alive."

Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee
Secker & Warburg, London, 1997
Page 102

J.M. Coetzee

"But is he in love with her nevertheless? Is this love--this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?"

Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee
Secker & Warburg, London, 1997
Page 95

J.M. Coetzee

"The memory of his mother on her bicycle does not leave him. She pedals away up Poplar Avenue, escaping from him, escaping towards her own desire. He does not want her to go. He does not want her to have a desire of her own. He wants her always to be in the house, waiting for him when he comes home."

Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee
Secker & Warburg, London, 1997
Page 4

Helen Garner

About Anu Singh... "But she had killed someone. Perhaps she was already as corrupted as the worst of them. What is corruption? Is corruption 'sin'? What is sin? Is it the inability to imagine the suffering of others?"

Joe Cinque's Consolation by Helen Garner
Picador, Sydney, 2004
Page 132

Helen Garner

"The fatigue I felt after the long day in court was also a kind of gratitude. I had been granted the inestimable privilege of looking into other people's lives. What I had found there had absorbed my intellectual and emotional attention for many hours."

Joe Cinque's Consolation by Helen Garner
Picador, Sydney, 2004
Page 121