Lily had lived in fear before she knew why she was afraid. She’d grown up knowing that people hated her. Perfectly ordinary people, the kind of adults who ought to be helping her to cross the road, hated Lily and wanted her gone. That was the climate of her childhood.

— Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

A trouble shared is a trouble halved.

— 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.

— Helen Dunmore

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

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

— Helen Dunmore

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

Is my mind closed? No. It’s wide open. I’m always waiting.

— Helen Dunmore

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

The see lifts me again, and carries me away with it.

— Helen Dunmore

Be brave. Each time you are brave, it grows easier.

— Helen Dunmore

We know everything about the Earth now, except how to keep her alive.

— Helen Dunmore

I’ve known for a long time about dolphins getting caught in nets and drowning there. But knowing is not the same as seeing it with your own eyes. I feel heavy, sad and responsible.

— Helen Dunmore

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

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

Lily had lived in fear before she knew why she was afraid. She’d grown up knowing that people hated her. Perfectly ordinary people, the kind of adults who ought to be helping her to cross the road, hated Lily and wanted her gone. That was the climate of her childhood.

— Helen Dunmore
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