Rumer Godden quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy. Rumer Godden found in Power of Simple Living by Ellyn Sanna

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

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.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author, nothing is as dead as a book once it is written. She is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up.

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

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

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

If you love the wrong people it's still love, isn't it, no matter what kind of love ...

in California I began to think that, except on the beaches, no-one had the use of their legs.

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.

Memory is the only friend of grief.

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.

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.

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

The motto was 'Pax', but the word was set in a circle of thorns.

The stitch of a book is its words.

I know now it is children who accept life; grown people cover it up and pretend it is different with drinks.

Nabir came out to drive the children away, but she stopped him. "I like to be friendly she said." "But they are not your friends," said Nabir. "You don't know them." "Respect first," Nabir would have said if he could have explained, "friendship after.

cleverness is a disease.

Every time a child, any child, is born, it is new - and different; that is the wonder.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her, and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

People don't know the consolations of being unsuccessful ... If I had been successful I should have had no peace or time.

The best would be to have friends who came and went away; but if I had to choose between their never coming or never going away, I think I would choose that they do not come.

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

To wake for the first time in a new place can be like another birth.

Wanting is the beginning of getting.

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

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

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

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