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.

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...

“It is My own peace I give unto you.” Not, notice, the world’s peace.

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

I wish I knew when I was going to die,’ ninety-six-year-old Dame Frances Anne often said, ‘I wish I knew.’ ‘Why, Dame?”Then I should know what to read next.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

The stitch of a book is its words.