10 Quotes & Sayings By Rumer Godden

Rumer Godden was a prolific English novelist, best known for her novels about India. Born in Bangalore, India in 1905. Her father was a surgeon, her mother a writer and editor of children's books. She spent part of her childhood in Burma and Japan Read more

In 1919, the family moved to England where Rumer attended Radley College and University College, Oxford. In 1928 she married the poet Geoffrey Scott and spent several years in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where she wrote her first novel, The Coral Island. In 1935 she left her husband and their son and returned to England.

During World War II she worked for the British War Office in a censorship unit overseeing the release of censored newsreels and propaganda films. She continued writing novels while living with friends in Bayswater, London until her death from cancer on 29 November 1976 at Oxford, aged 73.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and...
1
When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again. Rumer Godden
2
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. Rumer Godden
The human heart Is unknowable. But in my birthplace The...
3
The human heart Is unknowable. But in my birthplace The flowers still smell The same as always. Rumer Godden
4
..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
5
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
6
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. Rumer Godden
7
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
8
A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy. Rumer Godden
9
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. Rumer Godden