Best 23 quotes of Helen Humphreys on MyQuotes

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.

In some ways I spend longer at non-fiction because there are a lot of different threads to bring together. But non-fiction is more reflective than immersive. The problem with fiction sometimes is that you have to leave the real world to enter the fictional one. And that takes so much, goes into your head for so long . . . I don't know, I just feel less inclined toward that these days, and more inclined to remain in my own life. I do like really good fiction, but it's getting harder to hold my attention in a novel.

It's easy to feel equal to wanting. It's rare to feel equal to having.

Love is not a good thing, I've decided. It just makes you afraid you'll lose what you love, and then, because your fear makes a space for that to happen, it does. What's the point?

Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.

The heart is a river. The act of writing is the moving water that holds the banks apart, keeps the muscle of words flexing so that the reader can be carried along by this movement. To be given space and the chance to leave one's earthly world. Is there any greater freedom than this?

The novels are always morphing into something else now, some kind of hybrid, more of a ground that isn't so easily specified. I suppose you could call it creative non-fiction, and rather focused on the natural world, which is what I'm most interested in reading these days. At least that would be the closest thing, but my books also include some fiction, so they're difficult to pinpoint.

There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.

This is what I know about love, That it is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost. One chooses either to care more or to care less. Once the choice is to care less, then there is no stopping the momentum of goodbye. Each loved thing slips away. There is no stopping it.

What I like about mixing fiction and non-fiction is being able to fully explore an idea without being bound by genre. If you scratch under any surface there are histories for everything, aren't there? And there's unknown women's history in everything, too. It all gets simplified because its complexity is more than you can stand sometimes. So you need full freedom of expression.

Dark is just light turned inside out, thinks Maddy. Why be afraid of that?

I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead.

In the end, I will have to make a choice about how to tell my story....There has to be a moment of going forward, when all the possibilities are left behind.

It is light that dismantles each moment, I had thought then. Light proves it one thing or another. Darkness does not judge.

Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.

The language of roses shifts under our feet. It blows in and out like the wind. It carries the fragrance of the flower and then it is gone...It is how we learn to speak about something that is disappearing as we say its name.

The Moment opens. The moment closes. There is sunlight. There is frost. There is the brief idea of roses amid the patch of weeds.

The moon's a crazy sweetheart.

... the poetic moment is a static one. It's watching through a window while the action happens elsewhere. And then the poet turns away from the window because the poem is done ... It cannot unflinchingly stare grief down. At some point, by necessity, or design, it must turn away.

What they knew of longing was that it sprang from the earth at odd moments, unplanned and unexpected, brone on different carriers. But loss was more uniform than that. It surged up and carried one along. Loss was a choir. Loss moved in harmony. It struggled heavenward. It crashed to earth.

Who? Mr. Dalton has his hand firmly on Grace's elbow, as though she can't manoeuvre herself through the blockade of tables and chairs. She could fly right through you, thinks Jack.

With her right index finger she slowly spells words on Grace's skin. Don't let me go crazy. The moon is pale and vast. The stars so sharp they almost hurt.