Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

remember that people need only be told as much of the truth as they are entitled to know

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

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.

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

People don't know the consolations of being unsuccessful ... If I had been successful I should have had no peace or time.

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

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

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

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.

Wanting is the beginning of getting.

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

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