Top 50 Helen Dunmore Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Helen Dunmore

2. “Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.”

— Helen Dunmore

3. “I wish I was away in Ingo Far across the briny sea Sailing over deepest waters Where neither care nor worry trouble me.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

5. “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.”

— Helen Dunmore

6. “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

7. “Scars don’t matter, little one. They are the marks of the battles we have won.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

9. “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

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

— Helen Dunmore

11. “Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

14. “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

15. “Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

17. “We are creatures of story.”

— Helen Dunmore

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “A trouble shared is a trouble halved.”

— Helen Dunmore

19. “Chimpanzees look nearly human. They share most of their DNA with us. But we do research on them. We experiment on them and because they’re not quite human, that’s all right.”

— Helen Dunmore

20. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Helen Dunmore

Featured in: Strong Quotes

24. “It’s not evil that separates Earth and Ingo; it’s difference. But there are plenty who want to make evil out of difference.”

— Helen Dunmore

25. “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.”

— Helen Dunmore

26. “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.”

— Helen Dunmore

27. “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

28. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

29. “I was always influenced by language.”

— Helen Dunmore

30. “Everyone knows they’re only stories. Mermaids aren’t real: they’re a legend. As long as humans believe that, Ingo is safe.”

— Helen Dunmore

31. “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?”

— Helen Dunmore

32. “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

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

36. “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

37. “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

38. “It seemed to me that there was a self-interest hidden in the core of all of us, which cooled us when we contemplated any fate which did not touch us directly.”

— Helen Dunmore

39. “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

40. “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

41. “It must be quite hard when you’re a parent and you find out that your children’s dreams are nothing like the dreams you’ve had for them.”

— Helen Dunmore

42. “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.”

— Helen Dunmore

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

— Helen Dunmore

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Helen Dunmore

45. “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

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

— Helen Dunmore

47. “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.”

— Helen Dunmore

48. “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

49. “Go back to your house then, and see what happiness you find there.’ ‘It has nothing to do with happiness.’ ‘It is true that marriage seems often to have little to do with happiness. But who am I to judge? I have never been married.”

— Helen Dunmore

50. “The fire melts into velvety blackness. There are stars in the blackness, and I want to count them one by one, but they’re dancing too fast...”

— Helen Dunmore