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"If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us."
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"I think there's something inherently dishonest in trying to go back and mess with the past."

"Don't be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing chapters that you have read."

"Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold."
Explore more quotes by Helen Dunmore

"Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear."

"I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us."

"Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book."

"I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately."

"As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates."

"I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me."
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