Best 40 quotes of Rumer Godden on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

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.

cleverness is a disease.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Memory is the only friend of grief.

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.

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.

The stitch of a book is its words.

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

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

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.

...and as she stood on the Ashford platform waiting for the small train to come in, she seemed already separated from the people around her. Tomorrow I shall not be among you anymore; not of you but mysteriously still with you, thought Philippa. As Lady Abbess of Brede had said, "People think we renounce the world. We don't. We renounce its ways but we are still very much in it and it is very much in us.

I don't expect you to understand me any more than I can understand you; but I respect you and that's the difference between us.

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

I like the way everything is clear and concise, you'll always be forgiven but you must know the rules

In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still; it goes deeper and makes for itself a deeper groove, delves. Delve meansa 'dig with a spade'; it means hard work. In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself. It needs sturdiness. You will be lonely, you will be depressed; you must expect it; if you were training your body it would ache and be tired. It is worth it. There is a Hindu proverb which says: 'You only grow when you are alone'.

My nation, as all nations, is becoming a land without peace, without thought, without mind, Madam Abbess. We are suffocating our spirits in commercial and material things. This is not envy," said Mr. Konishi earnestly. "I am a rich man, with much business, so I have succeeded in all these things, but I know that they are empty.

The human heart Is unknowable. But in my birthplace The flowers still smell The same as always.

Towards four o'clock the dew fell, and she smelled a gust of sweetness from the roses and a paleness showed in the sky to the East. It was cold; the wetness was cold on her hands and she felt her skirt dragging around her ankles... the light spread, there were long lines of cloud in the sky and presently above them the outline of the snow peaks appeared, cold and hard as if they were made of iron; they turned from black to grey to white while the hills were still in darkness. Then the forest came, mysteriously out of the darkness, and the light moved down, turning the trees dark blue and green, and the terrace was full of a swimming light that was colourless and confusing... Then she looked up and saw that the Himalayas were showing in their full range, and were coloured in ash and orange and precious Chinese pink, deeper in the east, paler in the west. The people called it 'the flowering of the snows

When one came to know them it was surprising how childish grown people could be.

You don’t give up writing until writing gives you up.