Top 48 Helen Humphreys Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Loneliness is sometimes cured by visiting with people, and sometimes it's made worse by the same thing.
Helen Humphreys
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. It is not as though she's greedy for happiness, but she wishes that she'd been able to recognize it completely when she had it.
Helen Humphreys
#10. It's better to have no secrets. Lies are always harder to manage than the truth.
Helen Humphreys
#11. 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
#12. Dark is just light turned inside out, thinks Maddy. Why be afraid of that?
Helen Humphreys
#13. I like the candor of dogs. They're always honest about what they're feeling.
Helen Humphreys
#14. 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
#15. It's easy to feel equal to wanting. It's rare to feel equal to having.
Helen Humphreys
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Who? Mr. Dalton has his hand firmly on Grace's elbow, as though she can't manoeuvre herself through the blockade of tables and chairs.
She could fly right through you, thinks Jack.
Helen Humphreys
#20. 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
#21. The people who lived beside the river for thousands of years, and whose history was intertwined with that landscape, have been very effectively excluded from ts recorded narrative.
Helen Humphreys
#22. 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
#23. She hasn't had a book to read lately and that feeling of story rushes through her like a swoon.
Helen Humphreys
#24. I am a writer. The proof of how I am feeling is always in my pen.
Helen Humphreys
#25. 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
#26. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds", says Mrs. Phillips. "Our members will not be allowed to wear, or buy, ant hats with feathers, and they must devote themselves to the cause of protecting the birds and discouraging their wanton destruction.
Helen Humphreys
#27. The thing about longing is this: It is easy to feel equal to wanting. It is rare to feel equal to having.
Helen Humphreys
#29. The strong don't necessarily survive, but the mean invariably do.
Helen Humphreys
#31. Perhaps effort doesn't matter, it isn't what ensures survival.
Helen Humphreys
#32. This is the problem with time ... It doesn't follow its own rules. It stretches or compresses at will. It's either a lingering house guest or an escape artist.
Helen Humphreys
#33. 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
#34. She doesn't want to think of that woman, not now. She's just one more person who hasn't kept her promise; just one more person who hasn't returned to Harriet.
Helen Humphreys
#35. Emily Williamson never thought she would find commitment so liberating, that her conviction to her cause could promote such happiness within her. She stands in the London sunshine, watching Mrs. Phillips model as a heron, and she feels nothing but gratitude and wonder at the beauty of life.
Helen Humphreys
#36. If you pretend to feel a certain way, eventually you do feel that way. That has been a surprisingly pleasant lesson to learn in life.
Helen Humphreys
#37. I have often thought that poetry is a way to name loss, but it cannot accompany one on the journey of loss.
Helen Humphreys
#39. The period before something learns to be afraid is the most dangerous of all, because it is then the creatures are the most vulnerable.
Helen Humphreys
#41. With her right index finger she slowly spells words on Grace's skin.
Don't let me go crazy.
The moon is pale and vast. The stars so sharp they almost hurt.
Helen Humphreys
#42. 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. Each loved thing slips away. There is no stopping it.
Helen Humphreys
#43. Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.
Helen Humphreys
#44. Flight is not the astonishing thing. I have always thought that the miracle of birds is not that they fly, but that they touch down.
Helen Humphreys
#45. 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
#46. I have felt something in the garden I discovered. I have felt the presence of something other. And now, standing in the dark, with a salt wind blowing up from the invisible sea, from the remembered beloved river ...
Helen Humphreys
#47. 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
#48. 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
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