Quotes from Helen Dunmore

You have to keep on with a house, day after day, I think. Heating, cleaning, opening and closing windows, making sounds to fill the silence, cooking and washing up, laundering and polishing. As soon as you stop, there may as well never have been any life at all. A house dies as quickly as a body.

You live in the past,' Kate said. 'You live in your grandfather's time.' But she was wrong. The past was not something we could live in, because it had nothing to do with life. It was something we lugged about, as heavy as a sack of rotting apples.

You're trapped both ways. You do as you are told and you do things that you think will make you big, but all the time you're shrinking.

The word 'personal' is one of my aversions. Personal loan. Personal hygiene. Personal safety. It's only a way of wrapping up bad news that you're in debt, or dirty, or likely to be mugged.

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...

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.

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.

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.

As long as you two look out for each other, you'll be safe enough.

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

They stand close for a while, not touching, but breathing each other's breath. The city is silent now, as if for peace.

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)]

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.

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.

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?

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.

That's what people do in Holland. They build dykes and ditches. They don't drown. They're brilliant engineers.' 'So I've heard,' says Faro thoughtfully. 'They're very obstinate, those people in Holland.

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

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

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.