Life & Wisdom Quote by Helen Dunmore

There is something disarmingly tender and faintly possessive in Helen Dunmore's wish: not just that readers visit, but that they "choose to stay". The line frames imagination as a place you enter on purpose, like a house with the door left open, not a trapdoor into fantasy. That verb "choose" matters. Dunmore isn't selling escape so much as offering consent-based enchantment: a world persuasive enough that lingering feels like an act of agency, not surrender.

"Dreamworld" can sound airy, but in a poet's mouth it signals craft, not haze. Dunmore built rooms out of image and rhythm; you don't drift through them, you inhabit them. The phrasing also hints at a quiet confidence about poetry's power in a culture that treats attention as scarce. She isn't asking for a glance. She wants residency: the kind of absorption where a poem keeps working on you after you've put the book down, where its weather starts to mingle with your own.

Context sharpens the line's stakes. Dunmore wrote across poetry, novels, and children's literature, often threading the everyday with the uncanny, and often with an undertow of loss and memory. Her "Dreamworld" is less Disneyland than threshold: a space where ordinary life becomes newly charged, where grief and desire can be held without being simplified. The invitation is intimate but not naïve. She knows the reader can leave at any moment. That is exactly why she wants the stay to feel earned.