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

Helen Dunmore

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Helen Dunmore
Age: 64 †
Born: 1952
Born: December 12
Died: 2017
Died: June 5
Poet
Writer
Beverley
East Riding of Yorkshire
Past
Recognise
Likely
Happenings
Happening
Understand
Around

More quotes by Helen Dunmore

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I was always influenced by language.
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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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For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister
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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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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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I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.
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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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I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.
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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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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.
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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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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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We are creatures of story.
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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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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
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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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My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
Helen Dunmore
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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
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A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
Helen Dunmore
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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.
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