Best 41 quotes of Helen Dunmore on MyQuotes

Helen Dunmore

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    Helen Dunmore

    Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

    In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!

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    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.

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    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

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    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    Helen Dunmore

    Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

    Childhood is a slum and they love it.

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    Helen Dunmore

    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

    I suppose it's easier to kill people if you can pretend to yourself that they're not really people at all.

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    Helen Dunmore

    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

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

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    Helen Dunmore

    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.

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    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)]

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    Helen Dunmore

    Only a very few people leave traces in history, or even bequeath family documents to their descendants. Most have no money to memorialise themselves, and lack even a gravestone to mark their existence. Women's lives, in particular, remain largely unrecorded. But even so, did they not shape the future?

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    Helen Dunmore

    Scars don't matter, little one. They are the marks of the battles we have won.

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    Helen Dunmore

    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.

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    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?

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    Helen Dunmore

    Who would think that water could grind a rock to sand, or wear away a cliff, unless they'd seen it with their own eyes? Never say never, little sister. Who can tell what the future will bring?

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    Helen Dunmore

    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.

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    Helen Dunmore

    Your life can change in the blink of an eye, on a calm and beautiful Midsummer night. You lose what you love while you think it is still safe beside you.