Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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The function of the educator is to discover in each individual child the gifts implanted in her by Almighty God and to develop and dedicate them to His service.
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And as for herself, if she could manage to welcome sorrow as readily as joy, it would shape her as deftly as joy could have to whatever beauty of being it was within her power to reach...
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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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The past, she knew, is inviolable, one of the few things in life that cannot be marred by present foolishness, and in it the present may find its peace.
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To be sorry and glad together is to be perceptive to the richness of life.
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Love. The only indestructible thing. The only wealth and the only reality. The only survival. At the end of it all there was nothing else.
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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.
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Her pain came from inside herself, from her resentment of the contrariness and frustration of life, while his came most often from outside himself, growing inevitably from his compassion. It was a simplification of the difference between them to say that to the selfish comfort comes from the external things, while to the selfless consolation comes interiorly, but that was the way Daphne put it to herself.
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Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You may think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth; but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.
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In what he suffered, as in all true suffering and in true joy, there was the quality of eternity. He could not believe it would ever end.
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It was because it was so full of white wings that Fairhaven was such a happy place; wings of the yachts, of the seagulls, and of the swans . . . . White wings are for ever happy, symbols of escape and ascent, of peace and of joy, and a spot of earth about which they beat is secure of its happiness.
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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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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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The lovers of life, they are children at heart always in their wonder and delight, but they do not grab.
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But a hare, now, that is a different thing altogether. A hare is not a pet but a person. Hares are clever and brave and loving, and they have fairy blood in them. It’s a grand thing to have a hare for a friend.
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They gazed at her with awe, feeling to the full that medieval reverence for someone obviously touched in the head.
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I think God creates what one might call spiritual families, people who may or may not be physically related to each other, but who will travel together the whole of the way. And it's a long way.
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There was a good deal to be said, Hilary decided, for middle age and infirmity. The years in which one demanded much of life were left behind, together with the bitterness of not getting what one wanted. One's values, too, were altered. Gifts that once one took for granted, sunshine and birdsong, freedom from pain, sleep and one's daily bread, seemed now so extraordinarily precious.
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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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She did not suppose for a moment that anything worth having, and she now knew faith to be supremely worth having, was ever easy to have.
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Now she watched Nat as a small child watches a teacher from whom it must at all costs learn. He took to himself each day as it came with childlike trustfulness, and so did she. He never complained, and neither did she. He took every misfortune with a grin, and so did she. He took upon himself all the hardest and most unpleasant duties as a matter of mere routine, and she tried to do the same.
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Could mere loving be a life's work? Could it be a career like marriage or nursing the sick or going on the stage? Could it be adventure?
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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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He felt him transfixed, captured, nailed by his vow to the hard wood of the impossible thing he had to do.