Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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Hard labor and the passing of the years had contorted and hardened his limbs to queer, crooked shapes, but he gave no impression of deformity, as Nat did. So of the earth was he that he looked more like a tree than a man, one of those tough old pine trees that nothing in the way of weather except a thunderbolt will ever get the better of.
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One is at rest with people who want one; they are like a warm house with the door wide open. And one trusts an open door, for trust begets trust, and if the people inside didn’t trust you they wouldn’t leave it open.
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Civilization... is another word for respect for life. One can't have too much respect for a loveliness that's brittle as spun glass.
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She lived too close to despair to have any strength left for self-knowledge. She might have been able to acknowledge herself unloved but to know herself unloving was beyond her strength.
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All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.
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Firelight and Polly had lent a momentary charm to the parlor but now, looking up at the portrait, he was aware of having passed under the shadow of a dark hand. Emma, he realized, lived under it always. Her parlor was her past, and Isaac's, and if Issac in tearing himself out of its grip had torn himself too he was better off with his asthma and his nerves and his eccentricity than Emma. Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.
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Loneliness made or ruined a man. It frightened him so that he must either sing and build in the face of the dark, like a bird or a beaver, or hide from it like a beast in his den. There were perhaps always only the two ways to go, God or the jungle.
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Only at the very center of pain or joy was one wholly wretched, wholly joyful. There was only one hour of the night in which sunset or dawn was not present to the mind in memory or hope, only one hour of the day when the sun seemed neither rising nor declining, and the intensity of those hours dulled and blinded.
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Everyone needed someone in the world who was like his other hand. You can't hold much or do much with one hand only. It is with both hands that a man lifts the garnered gold of the wheatsheaf and the brimming bowl of milk, with both hands that he builds his house, with both hand, clasped together, that he prays.
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In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.
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“It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important, but what one made.
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Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.
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Evening fell, there were lights here and there upon the ships, scattered lights on the shore, faint lights in the sky, and still the silence was unbroken and the peace profound. Those on shore saw phantom ships upon the sea now, and those on board saw phantom white villages gleaming along the shore, and after the habit of human kind each man yearned to be where the other was, and saw in the place where he was not his heart’s desire.
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The God who had thrust him through in the darkness with probings of dread and shame was the same God who now held out the sword and shield.
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There had come to him one of those moments of quiet despair that lie in wait for even the happiest. Stealthy-footed they leap upon us, as we walk along the street, as we sit at evening with fruit and wine upon the table and laughter on our lips, as we wake suddenly from sleep in the hour before dawn; neither at our work nor our play nor our prayers are we safe, those moments can leap at any time out of the blackness around human life and suddenly the colors that we have nailed to our mast are there no longer and all that we have grasped is dust.
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People talk a lot of ballyhoo about suffering improving you. I should say that what it does is to underline what you were before.
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We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear," he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.
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As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist that make an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street itself.
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Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side.
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This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority - headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor - ever since it took hold the world's gone steadily downhill.
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She had wondered once if the human love she had longed for, and now knew, was symbolic and she realized with the approach of Christmas that the love of God contains the human power of love in its supernatural state. It was that that burst forth two thousand years ago and disrupted the world like a tidal wave.
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Be at peace now and let the tide carry you into calm water. That is all you have to do for the moment. God bless you.
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There are some people who don't realize what it is they are doing to others until they are paid back in their own coin. But those are not the worst. The worst are those whose unkindness is calculated.
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The end was present in the beginning and the beginning in the end, so that there was neither beginning nor end but only the perfection of the whole. Life had come round full circle, and the aging man that he was admitted it not with weariness but with a welling up within him of refreshment that was like the welling up of youth.