Reading and Writing : Amy Carmichael

Thou shalt have words
But at this cost, that thou must first be burnt ...
Not otherwise, and by no lighter touch,
Are fire-words wrought.

from Walker of Tinnevelly
(one of those flip the page of the
old book site!)
by Amy Carmichael
( full poem here)


Stuart Blanch, Archbishop of York
wrote in Learning of God about
Amy Carmichael's reading
that influenced her writing:

"She found a strange and surprising affinity with those writers who — so it would seem — floated inconsequentially into her orbit. In her there was, as it were, a cry of recognition: "It is the Lord!" ... It was by a miraculous alchemy that all these seemingly varied experiences of the living God combined in the hidden life of a largely unknown woman, confined to her room in a distant dependency of the British Empire."

Frank L. Houghton's Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur quotes Amy in a letter to a friend :

"I feel like offering a slab of chocolate to anyone who will tell me of a superfluous word, i.e. a word that has no work to do." The effort of editing, revising, cutting everything "superfluous" lies at the heart of all really good writing.

From Gold Cord:The Story of a Fellowship:

"It is the eternal in books that makes them our friends and teachers — the paragraphs, the verses, that grip memory and ring down the years like bells, or call like bugles, or sound like trumpets; words of vision that open to us undying things and fix our eyes on them."