Time & Perspective Quote by Helen Dunmore

Dunmore sneaks a big claim into a plainspoken sentence: identity isn’t discovered so much as narrated into being. “Shaped by story” sounds gentle, almost nursery-level, but it’s also quietly accusatory. If you are made of stories, then someone is always doing the making. The line’s force comes from how it refuses the heroic myth of the self-created individual without sounding like a manifesto. It uses the domestic—birth, parents, teachers, intimates—to show that ideology doesn’t only arrive through governments or headlines; it arrives through bedtime, schoolwork, and pillow talk.

The phrasing is deliberately passive: “we are shaped,” “we are formed,” “what we are told.” Dunmore foregrounds receptivity rather than agency, which is a poet’s way of pointing to power. Stories are not neutral deliveries of information; they are templates for what counts as normal, admirable, shameful, possible. Parents and teachers don’t just pass on facts. They pass on plotlines: who gets to be brave, who is warned to be careful, who is allowed to take up space. “Intimates” lands last for a reason. The people closest to us are often the most persuasive editors of our self-concept, rewriting our past in real time.

Context matters, too. Dunmore’s work often circles memory, family life, and the way private experience brushes against history. This line reads like a thesis for that project: the personal is already literary, and the literary is already political. The intent isn’t to romanticize storytelling; it’s to remind you that your “self” has a bibliography.