Helen Dunmore Quotes

“In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“We are creatures of story.”

— Helen Dunmore

“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”

— Helen Dunmore

“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?”

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

“You have to keep on with a house, day after day, I think. Heating, cleaning, opening and closing windows, making sounds to fill the silence, cooking and washing up, laundering and polishing. As soon as you stop, there may as well never have been any life at all. A house dies as quickly as a body.”

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

Fear of this order is not an emotion. It is like a virus overwhelming every cell of his body, while his mind struggles to remain clear.

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“They stand close for a while, not touching, but breathing each other's breath. The city is silent now, as if for peace.”

— Helen Dunmore

“Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]”

— Helen Dunmore

“It's so respectable you could put it in a Christmas circular letter.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“Childhood is a slum and they love it.”

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

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.

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.”

— Helen Dunmore

“When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.”

— Helen Dunmore

“Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

I was always influenced by language.

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

“Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight.”

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

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.

— Helen Dunmore

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

— Helen Dunmore

“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.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow.

— Helen Dunmore

I wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

— Helen Dunmore

Once one habit peels away the others follow it. You have to hold on, or the next thing you'll find yourself parading down the street in your nightdress. Habit is everything.

— Helen Dunmore