Top 50 Rumer Godden Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Rumer Godden

3. “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.”

— Rumer Godden

4. “It’s only by being obstinate that anything is got, or done.”

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

6. “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.”

— Rumer Godden

7. “I don’t know if I believe in God, but I know I believe in the devil. I have met him.”

— Rumer Godden

8. “Memory is the only friend of grief.”

— Rumer Godden

9. “Not what thou art, nor what thou hast been, beholdeth God with His merciful eyes, but what thou wouldst be.”

— Rumer Godden

10. “Every time a child, any child, is born, it is new – and different; that is the wonder.”

— Rumer Godden

11. “You can be a nuisance to your family. You mustn’t be a nuisance to your friends.”

— Rumer Godden

12. “The stitch of a book is its words.”

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

15. “A garden isn’t meant to be useful. It’s for joy.”

— Rumer Godden

16. “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.”

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

19. “I like the way everything is clear and concise, you’ll always be forgiven but you must know the rules.”

— Rumer Godden

20. “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

21. “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.”

— Rumer Godden

22. “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

23. “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.”

— Rumer Godden

24. “That was true, and dirt, earth, has power, an astonishing power of life, of creating and sweetening; it can take anything, a body, an old tin, decay, rust, corruption, filth, and turn it into itself, and slowly make it life, green blades of grass and weeds.”

— Rumer Godden

25. “If you love the wrong people it’s still love, isn’t it, no matter what kind of love...”

— Rumer Godden

26. “The greengages had a pale blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet.”

— Rumer Godden

27. “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

28. “Sometimes it seemed to him that the house had a bad wild life of its own; the impression of its evil lingered, in its name, in its atmosphere...”

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

30. “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

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

— Rumer Godden

32. “Wanting is the beginning of getting.”

— Rumer Godden

33. “And we pray in reparation, to make up for all those who won’t or can’t pray for themselves – especially anyone in grave sin. That’s why communities say the longest and most arduous Office at night – the time when most sin is committed in the world.’ ‘You mean a little Carmelite might sit up and pray for a murderer?’ ‘She has, with results,’ said Philippa.”

— Rumer Godden

34. “What happens when a sin is committed? Usually the sinner flourishes.”

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

36. “Sometimes,′ she said, remembering that morning, ‘I write poems that are taller than I am.”

— Rumer Godden

37. “You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain, or you’ll turn a little mad.”

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

40. “So many grown-up people seem to be nothing very much.”

— Rumer Godden

41. “And you needn’t worry about being useful,’ said Dame Ursula. ‘When you have become God’s in the measure He wants, He, Himself, will know how to bestow you on others.’ She was quoting St Basil. Then her face grew wistful, ‘“Unless He prefer, for thy greater advantage, to keep thee all to himself.” That does happen to a few people. Yet, paradoxically, they have the greatest influence.”

— Rumer Godden

42. “Funny,′ said Harriet to herself. ‘The world goes on turning, and it has all these troubles in it.”

— Rumer Godden

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

— Rumer Godden

44. “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

45. “None of us should marry, unless we love a man so much we would go through hell for him, which we shall probably have to do.”

— Rumer Godden

46. “I can’t,’ but it was acceptance now. ‘I can’t,’ whispered Dame Catherine, ’so You must.”

— Rumer Godden

47. “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

48. “And I still think,” said Olivia, “that it’s better to try and fail, doing what you want to do, than not to try.” She could not explain it more clearly that that but she knew it was the trying that was important; even if it fails, it goes to swell the sum total of trying, as a martyr’s faith, even if he is killed for it, swells the faith of everyone.”

— Rumer Godden

49. “If you haven’t the money to buy the quality you want, go without, don’t compromise.”

— Rumer Godden

50. “When you have become God’s in the measure He wants, He, Himself, will know how to bestow you on others.”

— Rumer Godden