Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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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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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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Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.
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Never again, she vowed, would she live a noisy life that killed her dreams. They were her reason for living, the only thing that she had to give to the world, and she must live in the way that suited them best.
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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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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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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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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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In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.
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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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Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.
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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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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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To know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.
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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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Is a man less of a man, because he's learned to hold his tongue?
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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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Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
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The fires of youth are not dead in old age... only banked down.
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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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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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A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.
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The scent of a flower is a very close and intimate thing, she thought. It can seem to be a part of your body and blood.
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The dawn came - not the flaming sky that promises storm, but a golden dawn of infinite promise. The birds came flying up out of the east in wedge-shaped formation, and the mist lifted in soft wreaths of sun-shot silver. Colour came back to the world. The grass glowed with a green so vivid that it seemed pulsing, like flame, from some hidden fire in the earth, the distant woods took on all the amazing deep crimsons and purples of their winter colouring, the banks were studded with their jewels of lichens and bright moss, and above the wet hedges shone with sun-shot orbs of light.