Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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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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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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Give me the benefit of your assistance during those ablutions that neccessarily, though unfortunatly, invariably follow the excercise of the culinary art.
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You're a sick woman. In a state of physical weakness it's so much easier to function in the groove you know. It seems to hold you together.
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All we are asked to bear we can bear.
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All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law, as of all benign laws, is fear.
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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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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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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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...there began to come to her a first dim realization of God's humility. Rejected by the proud in His own right by what humble means He chose to succor them; through the spirit of a child, a poor gypsy or an old man, by a song perhaps, or even it might be by the fall of a leaf or the scent of a flower. For His infinite and humble patience nothing was too small to advance His purpose of salvation and eternity was not too long for its accomplishment.
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He strolled to the front door and stood watching, letting the picture of Felicity grave itself so deeply on his mind that when with the passing of time it would seem to other people that she had grown old and lost her beauty it would not seem so to him.
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...this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.
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Bringing up children, she thought, was like pouring ginger beer into a tumbler. All went well up to a certain point, and then it all frothed over the top.
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Proud folk separate themselves from others, judging them... To criticize others we must hold them from us, at arm's length so to speak. And then before you know where you are you've pushed them away and you're the poorer.
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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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I've never been one for religion, but yet I've never been what ye could call an unbeliever. What I say is, nothin' don't seem impossible once you've clapped eyes on a whale.
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The other two with their happy, objective minds would always be absorbed in the moment but she would look backward and remember, and look forward and be afraid, and the present would always confuse her because she would never entirely live in it.
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Because of course she had known she must go. She always did the thing because in obedience lay the integrity that God asked of her. If anyone had asked her what she meant by integrity she would not have been able to tell them but she had seen it once like a picture in her mind, a root going down into the earth and drinking deeply there. No one was really alive without that root.
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It was the first time in her life that she had put her faith in God’s protection to the test, and it had not failed her.
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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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It is when children start to question their happiness that they lose it and grow up.
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She had known then that there were things one was more afraid of being without with ease than possessing with pain.
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A man may build as he chooses upon his foundations but he cannot change them or forget them, and if at the last the superstructure of his own building falls about his ears he tends to rediscover them at the end as the only rock he has to cling to.
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He grinned at her, and she grinned at him, and it seemed to Maria that suddenly the sun came out.