Helen Humphreys Quotes & Sayings

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

The thing about longing is this: It is easy to feel equal to wanting. It is rare to feel equal to having. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

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

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

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

It's easy to feel equal to wanting. It's rare to feel equal to having. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

I like the candor of dogs. They're always honest about what they're feeling. — Helen Humphreys

Perhaps effort doesn't matter, it isn't what ensures survival. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

It's better to have no secrets. Lies are always harder to manage than the truth. — Helen Humphreys

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

It's so hard to get life right, she thinks, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders. All the small balances are impossible to strike most of the time. And then there are the larger choices. It's hopeless. She might as well be one of those gannets, tossed about by the gusts of wind that drive up from the Atlantic. — Helen Humphreys

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

Sometimes life seems very unfair. — Helen Humphreys

Now I see how many wolf characteristics you had. You were wary, didn't really trust anyone or anything. You were elusive and secretive. You paced out behind the trees, watching everything and waiting for the moment when it was safe to come in and rest by the fire. But you weren't happy there -- no, I take that back, you were happy there, but you weren't comfortable. It wasn't what you knew. It wasn't what you trusted. You trusted meanness, not kindness. Kindness spooked you -- you were always looking for the trap in it. You trusted in a scrappy existence where you had to fight for your survival. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

Dark is just light turned inside out, thinks Maddy. Why be afraid of that? — Helen Humphreys

I have often thought that poetry is a way to name loss, but it cannot accompany one on the journey of loss. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

I like being mistaken for someone useful. — Helen Humphreys

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

I suppose," says Jeremy, "what I don't like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine."
Just like us, thinks Harriet. — Helen Humphreys

Enid had sent Rose a card with the words "I'm sorry" on it. She hadn't known what else to say because at that point she wasn't sure James knew anything about Toby Halliday. But now she wishes that she had said something else. Now that she's in love again herself - a complete surprise really, after all this time, and with someone she never expected to be in love with - Enid would tell Rose that she understands love is never the same. You can love different people over the course of a lifetime, but you won't love any two of them the same way, and quite frankly, you will love some of them more than others. A great deal more. If Toby was that to Rose - if he was the one she loved the most - then Enid would have said to her, "You will continue. But you will not recover. Don't expect that. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

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

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

This is why James likes birds- because they are all possibility. They make a line in the aid, the invisible line of their flight, and this line can join up with other lines or lead somewhere entirely new. All you have to do is believe that the line exists and learn how to follow it. And sometimes life will make this same invisible line for him, make him see where he came from, what he is attached to. — Helen Humphreys

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

The strong don't necessarily survive, but the mean invariably do. — Helen Humphreys

Loneliness is sometimes cured by visiting with people, and sometimes it's made worse by the same thing. — Helen Humphreys

You can't undo actions with words. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to. — Helen Humphreys

She hasn't had a book to read lately and that feeling of story rushes through her like a swoon. — Helen Humphreys

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

Forgetting takes practice ... You have to work at it. — Helen Humphreys

I am a writer. The proof of how I am feeling is always in my pen. — Helen Humphreys

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 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

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

The good thing about books is that they remain themselves. What happens in their pages stays there. Harriet does not like the idea of the story bleeding through into real life. She trusts a story, and doesn't trust real life. But what makes her trust a story is the knowledge that it will stay where it is, that she can visit it but that there is no chance it will visit her. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance. — Helen Humphreys

The moon's a crazy sweetheart. — Helen Humphreys

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

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

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

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