Helen Dunmore Quotes

Some things, if you don't do them, they follow you all your life, whispering in your ear," says Granny Carne. She faces me sternly as if she's judging me. "You'll find a dozen good reasons why you pulled back from the Call, and you'll even fool yourself that you had no other choice. But in your bed at night you'll curse yourself for a coward.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

He said a fortuneteller had told Mum's fortune once, and after that, she's never gone out on sea again. It was years ago, but she never has. Not once." said Conner
"What did the fortuneteller say?" I asked
"Dad wouldn't tell me. It must have been something really bad though."
"maybe the fortuneteller said that Mum would die by drowning." I suggested.
"Don't be stupid Saph. A fortuneteller wouldn't ever say that to someone. You're going to drown, that'll be ten pounds please

I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

You know how the sea grinds down stones into sand, over years and years and years? Nobody ever sees it, it happens so slowly. And then at last the sand is so fine you can sift it in your fingers. Losing Dad is like being worn away by a force that's so powerful nothing could resist it. We are like stones, being changed into something completely different.
If you looked casually at me and Mum and Conor now, you might think we were the same people as we were a year ago, except that we're a year older. But we are not the same people. We've changed where no one can see it, inside our minds and our feelings. I didn't want us to change, but I can't stop it.

I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister

As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.

I used to think that when a child was born, a parent made a promise to stay with him. Or her. But if there's a promise, it can be broken. That first Matthew Trewhella broke his promises. I wonder if he ever forgot them, or did the torn edges of his promises hurt him to the end of his life?

When someone goes away from you suddenly, without warning, that's what it's like. A rip, a torn edge inside you. I have a torn edge in me, and Dad has a torn edge in him. I'm not sure if those edges will still fit together by the time I find him.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

I don't know how you humans ever get anything done, you ask so many questions.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

I think that everything that happens to you stays in you, even if it stays in a part of your mind where you can't find it. That's why you should never try to forget when people urge you to.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

that omelettes couldn't be made without breaking eggs. Sacrifice

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin. But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?

To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.

The word 'personal' is one of my aversions. Personal loan. Personal hygiene. Personal safety. It's only a way of wrapping up bad news that you're in debt, or dirty, or likely to be mugged.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

Anna's too young yet to know that the past is just as real as the present, even though you have to pretend that it isn't, and carry on towards the future.

It was something he'd learned in the war: only think about what is directly in front of you. ... plan ahead all the time... but (don't ) feel ahead.
Pg 88

In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

They had something, that generation, he thought. They didn't doubt themselves. They knew what life was, and where they belonged in it. Not like us.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

I did not know what breath meant until she died. It was everything that gave me quickness and life: it was thought, feeling, animation. Without it there was nothing.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.

I was always influenced by language.

Dad was alive. I believed Conor, but I still didn't really know it.
But now I do.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

You're trapped both ways. You do as you are told and you do things that you think will make you big, but all the time you're shrinking.

The art of hiding in plain sight used to be second nature, and now it has become the whole of him

They will heal anyway, with time. We ... are strong. It takes more ... to conquer us.Scars don't matter, little one. They are the marks of the battles we have won.