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.”
― Rumer Godden

“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.”
― Rumer Godden, The Dolls' House

“When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.”
― Rumer Godden

“I loved Mr. Darcy far more than any of my own husbands.”
― Rumer Godden

“One of the good things about a Catholic church is that it isn't respectable," she had told Richard. "You can find anyone in it, from duchesses to whores, from tramps to kings.”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

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


Rumer Godden found in Power of Simple Living by Ellyn Sanna”
― Rumer Godden

“I wish I knew when I was going to die,' ninety-six-year-old Dame Frances Anne often said, 'I wish I knew.'
'Why, Dame?'
'Then I should know what to read next.”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

“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'.”
― Rumer Godden, Thus Far and No Further

“I have never understood why “hard work” is supposed to be pitiable. True, some work is soul destroying when it is done against the grain, but when it is part of “making” how can you grudge it? You get tired, of course, but the struggle, the challenge, the feeling of being extended as you never thought you could be is fulfilling and deeply, deeply satisfying.”
― Rumer Godden

“He had always disliked what he could easily have; he had a passion for the untouched.”
― Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus

“On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did.”
― Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer

“When one came to know them it was surprising how childish grown people could be.”
― Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer

“Is it easier to be than to do?”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

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

“You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain, or you'll turn a little mad.”
― Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus

“Not what thou art, nor what thou hast been, beholdeth God with His merciful eyes, but what thou wouldst be.”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

“I like the way everything is clear and concise, you'll always be forgiven but you must know the rules”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

“Why do religions have edges?” asked Teresa. Sophie felt those edges now. She went into the Mission chapel. It was a small whitewashed room with deal pews, a strip of blue carpet, a carved lectern, and an altar; on the altar were brass vases filled with holly, and, between them, a brass cross. It was a little refuge of holiness and quiet in the press and hurry and alarms of the hospital.
“God is here,” said the printed text on the wall. “Yes,” said Sophie. “But,” she asked, “isn’t He everywhere? Then why do they make Him little?” And she thought of those edges, pressing against each other, hurting, jarring, offending, barring one human being from another, shutting away their understanding and their souls.
Yet if you have no edges, thought Sophie, how lonely, how drifting, you must consent to be.”
― Rumer Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire

“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”
― Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus

“I know now it is children who accept life; grown people cover it up and pretend it is different with drinks.”
― Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer

“When I was a child I remember days that stretched into infinity with the certainty of other infinite days; certain, unhurried and brimmingly full.”
― Rumer Godden

“It would have been far easier to write about an active Order; people can see, understand and admire the good they do. ‘Sister,’ said a young American soldier when, in India, he watched a nun bandaging the rotting and malodorous finger stumps of an old leper, ‘Sister, I wouldn’t do your work for ten thousand dollars a day.’ ‘Neither would I,’ said the nun.”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

“Sometimes,' she said, remembering that morning, 'I write poems that are taller than I am”
― Rumer Godden, The River

“I think there are only two ways to live in this place,’ said Sister Philippa, ‘you must either live like Mr Dean or like the Sunnyasi; either ignore it completely or give yourself up to it.”
― Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus

“Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot ‘do’; they can only be done by; children who do not understand this often do wrong things, and then the dolls are hurt and abused and lost; and when this happens dolls cannot speak, nor do anything except be hurt and abused and lost. If you have any dolls, you should remember that.”
― Rumer Godden, The Dolls' House

“What happens when a sin is committed? Usually the sinner flourishes.”
― Rumer Godden, An Episode of Sparrows

“The motto was ‘Pax’, but the word was set in a circle of thorns. Pax: peace, but what a strange peace, made of unremitting toil and effort, seldom with a seen result; subject to constant interruptions, unexpected demands, short sleep at nights, little comfort, sometimes scant food; beset with disappointments and usually misunderstood, yet peace all the same, undeviating, filled with joy and gratitude and love. “It is My own peace I give unto you.” Not, notice, the world’s peace.”
― Rumer Godden

“...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.”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

“remember that people need only be told as much of the truth as they are entitled to know,”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

“So many grown-up people seem to be nothing very much.”
― Rumer Godden, The River