Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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I loathe, detest, hate and abominate the block, the gibbet, the rack, the pillory and the faggots with equal passion," said the old man vehemently. "Not only are they devilishly cruel but they are not even common sense. They do not lesson the evil in the world, they increase it, by making those who handle these cruelties as wicked as those who suffer them. No, I'm wrong, more wicked, for there is always some expiation made in the endurance of suffering and none at all in the infliction of it.
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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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Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.
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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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...accustomed like the white blackbird to the loneliness of eccentricity yet never quite reconciled to it, they found in each other's oddness a most comforting compatibility.
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I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can't, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God's help you can command your will when you can't command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn't appear to agree with us.
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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.
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If you lose your reason, you lose it into the hands of God....It's the only place where anything is safe. And when you're dead it's only what's there you'll have. Nothing else.
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The child in us is always there, you know, and it's the best part of us, the winged part that travels farthest.
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Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.
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In one life only had the fighting, the healing, the teaching, the praying, and the suffering held equal and perfect place, and that life could never on earth be lived again. For some dying men, he thought, there would have been comfort in the old belief that a soul comes back to earth again and again, the fighter returning to pray and the teacher to heal. Once he had half believed that himself, but now he could not. Once only had the perfect life been focused in a human body. He had not returned. Why should we? The Word now taught and healed, fought and suffered, through the yielded wills of other men.
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Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
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The man opposite, divided between anger and relief at the stripping away of his defenses, his nerves jangling, was taken utterly aback by the extraordinary beauty of Hilary's eyes without their glasses, by their keen, straight glance, by the enveloping warmth of his utterly happy yet rather deprecating smile. The immense power of his goodwill, together with his personal humility, made a sudden unexpected appeal that got right under Malony's guard before he knew where he was. He wasn't out to do you good, this chap - he didn't think enough of himself for that - he was simply out to jog along beside you for a little, and pass the time of day, knowing you were down on your luck, and thinking a bit of companionship might not come amiss.
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All we are asked to bear we can bear.
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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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To know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.
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Nothing whatsoever, not even the existence of God to His lovers, can be proved, but that every man, if he is to live at all finely, must deliberately adopt certain assertions as true, and those assertions should, for the sake of the enrichment of the human race, always be creative ones. He may, as life goes on, modify his beliefs, but he must never modify them on the side of destruction. It may be difficult, in the face of the problem of human suffering, to believe in God... but if you destroy God you do not solve your problem but merely leave yourself alone with it.... A ghastly loneliness.
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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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They gazed at her with awe, feeling to the full that medieval reverence for someone obviously touched in the head.
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Cowardice more than any other failing demands a ruthless paying of the price from those who give it hospitality.
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Sarcasm doesn't grow on the same stalk as humility.
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The fires of youth are not dead in old age... only banked down.
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The real comfort was to have one's sins and weaknesses not explained away but understood and shared. John's identification of himself with Michael in so much was what he needed. He found strength in it... It struck him that it can be as much by our weakness as by our virtue that we can serve each other.
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They were accustomed to think of the Abbé as one of those men who pass rapidly from point to point, from task to task, so intent on redeeming the time because the days are evil that they have no leisure to pause and enquire if perhaps the bad days have a few good points about them after all.