Rumer Godden Quotes

There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emtional, and a spiritual . Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

Memory is the only friend of grief.

Wanting is the beginning of getting.

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy.

I don't know if I believe in God, but I know I believe in the devil. I have met him.

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.

It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.

With everything that happens to you, with everyone you meet who is important to you, you either die a little or are born.

Most grown people are like icebergs, three-tenths showing, seven-tenths submerged - that is why a collision with one of them is unexpectedly hurtful.

In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still ... In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights, but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself.

Once you have felt the Indian dust, you will never be free of it.

Drink very good tea out of a thin Wocester cup of colour between apricot and pink.

If books were Persian carpets, one would not look only at the outer side. because it is the stitch that makes a carpet wear, gives it its life and bloom.

As one gets older being sad and miserable can become a bit of a habit. To counteract this, she suggests making a point of savoring such things as the tastiness of a piece of fruit, or other small things we might have been prone to overlook during our younger, busier days.

Every piece of writing starts from what I call a grit a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

You can be a nuisance to your family. You mustn't be a nuisance to your friends.

if you think you know, you don't ask questions, or if you ask, you don't listen to the answers. Everyone, everything, each thing, is different, so that it isn't safe to know. You - you have to grope.

Of course one never knows in draft if it's going to turn out, even with my age and experience.

I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organize and concentrate-or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my 'ten minutes'. I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.

It's only by being obstinate that anything is got, or done.

For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.

You must remember garden catalogues are as big liars as house-agents.

I loved Mr. Darcy far more than any of my own husbands.