Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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There were still children in the world, and while there were children, men and women would not abandon the struggle to make safe homes to put them in, and while they so struggled there was hope.
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There was a leap of joy in him, like a flame lighting up in a dark lantern. At this moment he believed it was worth it. This moment of supreme beauty was worth all the wretchedness of the journey. It was always worth it. "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." It was the central truth of existence, and all men knew it, though they might not know that they knew it. Each man followed his own star through so much pain because he knew it, and at journey's end all the innumerable lights would glow into one.
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And the written words were footsteps, feet running hard to another person.
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A man is not a different person just because he becomes aware. Oh I know it must seem like metamorphosis when the eyes of a blind man are opened, but he's the same man. We grow, mercifully, and growth is just awareness of more and more.
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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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During these last twelve years, with his left hand scarcely aware of what his right was up to, he had saved many souls. And he never saw a weeping child in the street without administering lollipops, or an old woman carrying a heavy burden but he did not turn aside to carry it for her. His huge kindness grew with the years, and his wealth, by giving him the means of gratifying it, had enlarged rather than shut up his heart. Though he had continued through all these years to detest the pursuit of money, yet its possession had done much for him.
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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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What is the distinguishing mark of an aristocrat?' she asked him suddenly.'Reverence,' he replied.
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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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If you believe in God omnipresent, then you must believe everything that comes into your life, person or event, must have something of God in it to be experienced and loved; not hated.
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Butterflies... not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.
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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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And then I say to myself that we should believe in that which we felt when we were strong and happy rather than in that which we feel when we are sick and sad. Do you not think, Judith, that one is more truly oneself in times of joy than in times of sorrow?
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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.
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We cannot change the sort of person that we are.
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But no, he did not believe in capricious fortune, but in a carefully woven pattern where every tightly stretched warp thread of pain laid the foundation for a woof thread of joy.
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Autumn days have a holiness that spring lacks ... They are like old serene saints for whom death has lost its terror.
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One thing however, Nat did for him. He taught him carpentry. He learned to distinguish between the different kinds of wood, to love them and understand their ways. Realizing that the boy had great skill with his hands Nat gave him a few tools for his own and taught him wood carving.... First the books and then the wood. Each was a milestone for him on the way through.
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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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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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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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Though I am able to do nothing else in this life, except only seek, my life seeming to others a vie manquee, yet it will not be so, because what I seek is the goodness of God that waters the dry places. And water overflows from one dry patch to another, and so you cannot be selfish in digging for it.
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These black times go as they come and we do not know how they come or why they go. But we know that God controls them, as he controls the whole vast cobweb of the mystery of things.
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It was only in his rare moments of silence, when his face fell into repose and the laughter died out of his eyes and his full lips drooped one upon the other, that one observer in a thousand might have known him for a man who dared not think. In those moments he looked like a mangy, sad old lion looking out upon the splendor of the grand old days from behind the bars of his prison cell.