Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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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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Rachell believed passionately in the value of beauty. If she was pressed for time she considered the filling of her bowl with flowers more important for her family's welfare than the making of a cake for tea. On this point her family entirely disagreed with her.
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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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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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...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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Life's very like a husband you know, my dear; it makes you bring forth fruit.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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We cannot change the sort of person that we are.
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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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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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There was of course that other thing, that power that had been given him of taking hold of an evil situation, wrestling with it, shaking it as a terrier shakes a rat until the evil fell out of it and fastened on himself. Then he carried the evil on his own shoulders to the place of prayer, carried it up a long hill in darkness, but willingly. Each time he felt himself alone, yet each time when the weight became too much for him it was shared, then lifted, as though he had never been alone. Even it there had been no hope of help he would still have been just as willing.
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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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Don't waste hate on pink geranium.