Life & Wisdom Quote by Helen Dunmore

Alive language is an artistic stance, but it is also a moral one. When Helen Dunmore says she "can't bear dull, flaccid writing", she isn’t merely airing a stylistic preference; she’s drawing a hard line about attention. For a poet, dead prose isn’t neutral. It’s a failure of nerve: language that doesn’t risk precision, surprise, or sensory charge ends up anesthetizing the reader, asking them to spend their finite focus on something that won’t change them.

The phrasing is doing quiet work. "Got to" reads like necessity, not aspiration. "Fully alive" suggests more than prettiness; it implies metabolism - words that breathe, move, and respond to the world. Then she swings to the body: "dull, flaccid". That’s not just criticism, it’s disgust. Flaccid is what happens when pressure disappears, when energy drops and the muscle of a sentence stops holding shape. Dunmore’s subtext is that writing is felt physically; the reader’s experience is not abstract but visceral. If the language doesn’t have pulse, why should anyone stay in the room?

Context matters: Dunmore wrote across poetry, novels, and children’s literature, often with an acute sensitivity to memory, loss, and the natural world. That range sharpens her impatience. She knows readers are not obliged to admire craft for craft’s sake; they’re looking for a live wire - clarity with voltage. The insistence is also democratic. She refuses the idea that boredom is the price of seriousness, or that blandness is respectable. If you’re going to ask for a reader’s time, you owe them sentences that earn it.