RUMER GODDEN

The stitch of a book is its words.

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.

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

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.

Memory is the only friend of grief.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

cleverness is a disease.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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