Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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The whole universe was stilled as if listening for a voice. For the space of one heartbeat there was peace on earth. For one fraction of a moment there was no deed of violence wrought on earth, no hatred, no fire, no whirlwind, no pain, no fear. Existence rested against the heart of God, then sighed and journeyed again.
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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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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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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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Perhaps she had not understood the heights to which prayer must rise before it becomes pure praise, the fortitude that is demanded before it can share in the redemption of man's soul. The man of prayer beside her had said it was action, the greatest activity there is. She began to believe him.
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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.
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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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Love still owned him, steered him, drew him to itself.
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All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.
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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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To know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.
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He remembered suddenly, at this moment, as he looked at the squares of moonlight lying on the floor, the time when he had first realized that pain is a thing that we must face and come to terms with if life is to be lived with dignity an not merely muddled through like an evil dream... In some vague way he had understood that dark things are necessary; without them the silver moonlight would just stream away into nothingness, but with them it can be held and arranged into beautiful squares.
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For a few minutes the anxiety that tormented him had vanished, leaving his mind as serene as the beauty he looked at. Very lovely, he thought, are the sudden moments of relief that come in the midst of strain, those moments of forgetfulness when we are "teased out of thought" by a bird or a flower or the sight of old roofs in the sun; lovely though so transient, the reversal of those brief moments of misery that visit us even in the midst of joy.
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All we are asked to bear we can bear.
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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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The measure of her bitterness was the measure of her failure.
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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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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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Life's very like a husband you know, my dear; it makes you bring forth fruit.
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Suffering had had an effect with which she was familiar. The refusal of self-pity and despair had turned it from lead to fire, burning up the subterfuges and dishonesties below the surface of the inherited veneer of manners and thought that most men and women think are their true selves, and the veneer with them.
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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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Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.
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Fairyland...Paradise...In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.
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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.