Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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He grinned at her, and she grinned at him, and it seemed to Maria that suddenly the sun came out.
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It is when children start to question their happiness that they lose it and grow up.
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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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In moments of exaltation one expressed sentiments that outstripped one's spiritual capabilities by a vast span; and she knew well that unless God is sought for Himself alone, with a selflessness of which she was at present incapable, He is not to be found.
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Writers and painters have a medium that can foster self-effacements. Actors haven't. An actor can't hide himself behind paper or canvas. If you're not there your art's not there. That's why we actors are often such self-centered objects.
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The years stretched before her, a long and dusty way, yet if she could walk humbly along it she might find that life, unfolding slowly, keeps its best secrets till the end.
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The very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.
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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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One was born a certain sort of person, and though by ceasless struggle one might become as nice as that sort of person ever is, one could never become as nice as a nicer sort of person.
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This gathering of one’s back hair inside a large net, the new style of hairdressing that William and Tai Haruru had failed to notice on the last peaceful evening at the settlement, was excellently adapted for civil war in the primeval forest, she thought, though possibly the Parisian hairdresser who had devised the fashion had been unaware of the fact.
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The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.
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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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In the utter peace and stillness the world seemed holding its breath, a little apprehensively, drawing near to the fire to warm itself. There was none of that sense of urgeful, pushing life that robs even a calm spring day of the sense of silence; life was over and the year was just waiting, harboring its strength for the final storms and turmoil of its death. The warmth and the color of maturity was there, exultant and burning, visible to the eyes, but the prophecy of decay was felt in a faint shiver of cold at morning and evening and a tiny sigh of the elms at midnight when a wandering ghost of a wind plucked a little of their gold away from them.
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...now her compassion had been pierced and set flowing; it felt as though her life's blood were running away.
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His hunger for knowledge gave him no rest, it was both his bane and his joy.
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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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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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A close union with the earth seemed to involve one in unison with a good deal more than the earth.
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Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred, since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin.
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Folks don't fall from laughter to fear in that way when they're nervously strong, and nerves take their toll of the body in the end.
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She long ago accepted the fact that happiness is like, swallows in spring. It may come and nest under your eaves or it may not. You cannot command it.
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Joy being of God was a living thing, a fountain not a cistern, one of those divine things that are possessed only as they overflow and flow away, and not easily come by because it must break into human life through the hard crust of sin and contingency. Joy came now here, now there, was held and escaped.
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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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Believe instead in love. It is my faith that love shaped the universe as you shape your clocks, delighting in creation. I believe that just as you wish to give me your clock in love, refusing payment, so God loves me and gave Himself for me. That is my faith. I cannot presume to force it upon you, I can only ask you in friendship to consider it.