“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Lost Garden
“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, quote from The Lost Garden
“Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from 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, quote from The Lost Garden
“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, quote from The Lost Garden
“I have often thought that poetry is a way to name loss, but it cannot accompany one on the journey of loss.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from 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, quote from The Lost Garden
“Sometimes our passion is our ruin.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“For maybe this is how poetry can be of use. Though it can't move with us, we can move it between us, pass it among us, so it is held up by our voices, so it moves with our breath, our living breath.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“The thing about longing is this: It is easy to feel equal to wanting. It is rare to feel equal to having.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“It is light that dismantles each moment, I had thought then. Light proves it one thing or another. Darkness does not judge.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“The Moment opens. The moment closes. There is sunlight. There is frost. There is the brief idea of roses amid the patch of weeds.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“The author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“What they knew of longing was that it sprang from the earth at odd moments, unplanned and unexpected, brone on different carriers. But loss was more uniform than that. It surged up and carried one along. Loss was a choir. Loss moved in harmony. It struggled heavenward. It crashed to earth.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“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, quote from The Lost Garden
Helen Humphreys
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date March 29, 1961
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“I’m here to take you on a date.”
I blinked. “A date?” I repeated as if it was a foreign word I’d never heard before.
“You know, where we go out, hold hands, cast longing glances at each other? It’s tradition. You might have heard of it.”
“But I have class.”
“Class?” Now he was looking at me as if I was speaking a different language. “But it’s ten o’clock at night.”
“We have classes until midnight.” I smiled pointedly. “The thing about vampires is that they kind of like the night. It’s tradition. You might have heard of it?”
“Oh, smart mouth.” He grinned back. “Sexy.”
― Alyxandra Harvey, quote from Out for Blood
“Reaching out, I grab his hand and intertwine my fingers with his. And I move into his space until we're not even an inch from each other. Laying my forehead on his chest, I take a deep breath and feel his whole body relax, as if tension is rolling off his body in waves.
I was always the kid who loved the smell of gasoline.
His free hand comes up, and his fingers slip through my hair before his hand settles between my shoulder blades.
"Ben," I say into his shirt.
"Janelle," he whispers back, and I can feel his mouth against my hair. I can feel him smile.”
― Elizabeth Norris, quote from Unraveling
“You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child, but I do. When they’re gone, every cold word you uttered is a scar on your soul, every missed opportunity with them a pain that will never heal.”
― Jeaniene Frost, quote from Bound by Flames
“All that time I'd spent worrying about why I'm here and how I'm supposed to live had kept me from remembering that Jeremy Pratt will never be back. His people will never have him again. He is Jeremy Pratt who died and stayed dead and will never get a second chance. And even though that hand that spent the last five years holding hers was somehow doing it again, it wasn't Jeremy Pratt's anyone”
― John Corey Whaley, quote from Noggin
“It was just a kiss – "
"Yeah, and King Kong was just a monkey.”
― Linda Howard, quote from After the Night
Origin
Emperor of Thorns
Starlight
Sea Glass
Moonrise
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