“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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“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?”
― John Hersey, quote from Hiroshima
“With a volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce and stately way. Mr. Shiftlet was in the driver’s seat, sitting very erect. He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead.”
― Flannery O'Connor, quote from A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“But I know Jesus arose. I feel his presence now, here, with me. I see the evidence of his Word everyday. From creation forth, the whole world is witness to God's plan revealed through his Son. From the beginning, he prepared us. In the passing of the seasons; in the way flowers spring forth, die, and drop seeds for life to begin again; in the sunset and sunrise. Jesus' sacrifice is reenacted every day of our lives if we but have the eyes to see.”
― Francine Rivers, quote from A Voice in the Wind
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from The Book of Disquiet
“Sometimes in our job you feel you just can't win. If you take too long you're no good, if you're too quick the visit wasn't necessary.”
― James Herriot, quote from All Things Bright and Beautiful
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See How They RunBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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