Literary Birthday – 10 December – Rumer Godden

Rumer Godden was born 10 December 1907 and died 8 November 1998.

Quotes

1. There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, 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.
2. When you learn to read you will be born again…and you will never be quite so alone again.
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.
4. To me and my kind, life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories – that is the way it falls.
5. A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory… dictionaries, thesaurus, poems, favourite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.
6. Of course one never knows in draft if it’s going to turn out, even with my age and experience.
7. For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.

Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and nonfiction books. Her novels, poems, and non-fiction books deal with her experiences in colonial India and in England. Nine of her works have been made into films, including Black Narcissus in 1947. Godden was named O.B.E. in 1993.

Source for quotes

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rumer_Godden_(1).jpg

Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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