Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
In the utter peace and stillness the world seemed holding its breath, a little apprehensively, drawing near to the fire to warm itself. There was none of that sense of urgeful, pushing life that robs even a calm spring day of the sense of silence; life was over and the year was just waiting, harboring its strength for the final storms and turmoil of its death. The warmth and the color of maturity was there, exultant and burning, visible to the eyes, but the prophecy of decay was felt in a faint shiver of cold at morning and evening and a tiny sigh of the elms at midnight when a wandering ghost of a wind plucked a little of their gold away from them.
Elizabeth Goudge
Quotes to Explore
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
Civilization... is another word for respect for life. One can't have too much respect for a loveliness that's brittle as spun glass.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
“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.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.
Elizabeth Goudge
People talk a lot of ballyhoo about suffering improving you. I should say that what it does is to underline what you were before.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.
Elizabeth Goudge
The tragic capacity of the human race for going off course was a little balanced by the integrity of the animals who were always obedient to the law of their being. We were meant to love like that, thought Mary, simply because that's our law and we were told to obey it.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
He sat for a long time and thought to himself that he wished he knew how to pray, yet he knew, untaught, how by abandonment of himself to let the quietness take hold of him.
Elizabeth Goudge
In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
