Helen Humphreys > Quotes

“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.”
― Helen Humphreys, Coventry

“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.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“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?”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“What I've always found interesting in gardens is looking at what people choose to plant there. What they put in. What they leave out. One small choice and then another, and soon there is a mood, an atmosphere, a series of limitations, a world.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“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.”
― Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

“Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“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.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“When a writer writes, it's as if she holds the sides of her chest apart, exposes her beating heart. And even though everything wants to heal, to close over and protect the heart, the writer must keep it bare, exposed.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“Time doesn’t really soften anything. Memories heave up, you know. Still sharp.”
“Forgetting takes practice,” says Enid. “You have to work at it.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Evening Chorus

“There are words in my life that I wish I'd never said. I wish I'd never told my wife that I loved her, because then I had to line up all my actions with those words. I had to always act like that was true. And those three words, I love you, should never be used if you don't mean them. My lying has meant I will never get to use them on anyone else. I went against my own truth, my own heart, and there is really no coming back from that.”
― Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

“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.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“I don't think anymore that my life is about what has happened to me. It's about what I choose to believe. It's not what I can see, but what I think is out there. And in the end, this end, here is what I believe. The heart is a wild and fugitive creature. The heart is a dog who comes home.”
― Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

“She hasn't had a book to read lately and that feeling of story rushes through her like a swoon.”
― Helen Humphreys, Afterimage

“Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“She believes in the words of her fortune teller, but really, anyone could have told her that if you have to stop doing the thing you love, it will kill you.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames

“The point, dear Davis, is that sometimes what you want is nothing more than to put your name beside someone else's, someone whom you love. Stretch your name out alongside theirs as though it was you, lying next to them.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“Your leaving will not be solved by your coming back. But one does not preclude the other. And maybe that is always what there is to fear, in everything that happens-what we choosee to love to will choose to forsake us.”
― Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

“I have seen animals shot, and I have seen people who have been blindsided by greief. We always know what has hit us. We don't always know that it will kill us.”
― Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

“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.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“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.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“I am a writer. The proof of how I am feeling is always in my pen.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Reinvention of Love

“The moon's a crazy sweetheart.”
― Helen Humphreys, Leaving Earth

“The truth is that you do forget people. When you conjure them up, long after they have gone, you can’t recall the essence of them, just the outline.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Evening Chorus

“I don't think any more that my life is about what has happened to me. It's about what I choose to believe. It's not what I can see, but what I think is out there.

And in the end, this end, here is what I believe.
The heart is a wild and fugitive creature.
The heart is a dog who comes home.”
― Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

“I like being mistaken for someone useful.”
― Helen Humphreys, Coventry

“I have often thought that poetry is a way to name loss, but it cannot accompany one on the journey of loss.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“It's as if I've never seen Jane before, never known her. With just an undervest on, she looks unbelievably thin. Arms no wider than the sticks of a bower. A collarbone protuding from the skin in all its detail. And with that one gesture, I learn the fundamental truth of her. When she takes off her sweater and, without thinking, hands it over to David to use as wool, I can see how Jane loves. And I know -with all my heart I know- that there is no protection in the world for someone who loves like that.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“It's funny to think that Anson and I were here, in this same place, together all that time ago, and now here we are again. It makes me feel good, makes me feel that perhaps everything doesn't just disappear, that some things are circling back, taking the long way, but circling back towards me.”
― Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

“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?”
― Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

“Another time might be easier than this one, but there’s only the time you’re in, thinks Enid. And it’s always going to be lacking somehow. Best to spend some of your moments here on earth noticing what else is here with you instead of concentrating solely on your own misery.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Evening Chorus