Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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When the demon was muscling for action she was like the princess in the fairy tale from whose mouth toads fell. The small part of her which remained outside the dominion of her temper stood aghast but inefficient as one after the other the reptiles showered forth.
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...your God is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, 'Lord, have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.' Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these, you will do well.
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Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.
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There's much that goes to the makin' of a man or woman into somethin' better than a brute beast, but there's three things in chief, an' they're the places where life sets us down, an' the folks life knocks us up against, an' -- not the things ye get, but the things ye don't get.
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There always comes, I think, a sort of peak in suffering at which either you win over your pain or your pain wins over you, according as to whether you can, or cannot, call up that extra ounce of endurance that helps you to break through the circle of yourself and do the hitherto impossible. That extra ounce carries you through 'le dernier quart d' heure.' Psychologist have a name for it, I believe. Christians call it the Grace of God.
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Cleanliness', chuckled Sir Benjamin, noting his great niece's delighted smile as her eyes rested upon him, 'comes next to godliness, eh, Maria?
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...The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.
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Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart.
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It's not your business to decide if a woman you love should, or should not, marry you. It's her business. Tell her all about yourself and leave the decision to her. God knows it's trouble enough having to make one's own decisions in life without having to make other people's too.
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It got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They couldn't do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone.
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She could only wait. But she was not idle while she waited, because she was holding herself in readiness for whatever it was that she would have to do. She was trying not to be frightened in her mind, and she found that that sort of waiting and thinking really keep a person quite busy.
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To be sorry and glad together is to be perceptive to the richness of life.
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...whatever happens I'll not be afraid again; for, when you've once pushed through the place of torment to the peace beyond, you know that you can do it again. You know there's a strength somewhere that you can call upon. You've confidence.
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To some people fighting in itself is enjoyable, and she supposed that the fighters of this world can always get some sort of a kick out of things.
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When the spirit of praise had been poured into a man he forgot what he was; he was like a cheap ugly glass made beautiful by the golden wine which filled it. Empty, he knew his ugliness. In prayer, for those as undisciplined and inexperienced as himself, there were times when one scarcely seemed the same person for five minutes together. He took grip on himself and knelt upright, clinging to his belief that one was not the same being; one was the self that one was now in all the disturbance and agitation of weakness, and the self that one would be when the compass needle had once and for all steadied to the north. His hands gripping the sides of the stall, he pronounced in words his belief that even for such as he, if he could endure to the end, eventual perfections was not only possible but certain through the grace of God, his conviction that despair was sin. The prayer of words was all he had now. The discipline of words must hold him up until the desert was crossed and the Seraph could sing again.
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She had no beauty to commend her apart from the sweetness of her smile and the kindliness of her round brown eyes, but she carried with her wherever she went that aura of almost heavenly motherliness which so often shines about a woman who has borne only one child, and in losing it has become mother to all the world, shining more wonderfully than about the mother of a dozen.
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Peace....Henrietta was not quite sure what it was but she knew it was very important. If one wanted it, Grandfather had told her once, one must not hit back when fate hit hard but must allow the hammer-strokes to batter out a hollow place inside one into which peace, like cool water, could flow.
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If you can’t marry the man you love, then the next best thing is to marry one who is easily managed. . . . But the best thing of all, of course, is to marry a man beloved as well as manageable, as she herself intended to do.
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She felt for the first time in her life, a sense of likeness with another human creature, and a sense of safety, not so much physical safety as the safety of understanding that comes between those who are two of a sort.
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I have known him nearly all my life, and I am going to marry him, so that there won't ever be a time when I shan't know him.
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Nothing he could do or say would bridge the gulf because there was nothing here to appeal to. There was nothing here but anger and fear, things in themselves entirely sterile. Divorced from the love of righteousness, the fear of God, they were nothing. There was nothing here. He had not realized before the ghastly evil of negation. He had seldom felt such evil. Nothingness was a bottomless pit...
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Progress in evil was quick and easy; Apollyon was not a chap who hid himself and he gave every assistance in his power. The growth in goodness was so slow, at times so flat, so dull, and like the White Queen one had to run so fast to stay where one was, let alone progress; and there were few men who dared to say they had found God. It was easy to be a clever sinner, for the race to an earthly visible goal was short to run, so impossibly hard to be a wise saint, with the goal set at so vast a distance from this world and clouded with such uncertainty.
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Is a man less of a man, because he's learned to hold his tongue?
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He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.