Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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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 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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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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The storm had passed and the whole fen lay bathed in spent sunlight. Every stream and stretch of water among the rushes, which had been whipped and tormented by the storm, lay quiet now, reflecting the piled masses of white and silver clouds that floated like swans on the far deep pools of the sky. Every twig was strung with sparkling crystal drops, and every drop had a rainbow caught in its heart.
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These warm lovers of life, born under dancing stars, how without them was life tolerable for those, such as himself, whose bias was towards sadness, their stars cloud-hidden when their spirits woke to life....In this world, surely, there should always be a mating between the lovers of life and the endurers of it, in couples they should find a causeway for their feet and walk it together, the star-shine of the one comforting the darkness of the other.
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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 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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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.
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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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After almost a lifetime spent in prayer and contemplation she had believed that at least she had her thoughts well disciplined, but as one got older, one’s hard-won control slipped a little and one felt sometimes as though spiritually one were back again in one’s youth, with all the battles to fight again.
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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.
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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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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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...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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His hunger for knowledge gave him no rest, it was both his bane and his joy.
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Don't waste hate on pink geranium.
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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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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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A close union with the earth seemed to involve one in unison with a good deal more than the earth.
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...you don't have to know just what people are doing and feeling to be of assistance to them. Your own life seems to you like a very small lighted room, with great darkness all around it, and you can't see out into the darkness and know what is happening there. But light and warmth from your room can go out into the darkness if you don't have the windows selfishly curtained, keep a brave fire burning, and light all the happy candles you can.
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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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It's a poor sort of virtue that has no roots in love. It's why you do or don't do a thing that matters most to my mind. If love of God comes first with you then you deny yourself to keep His commandments, you give away your whole life to Him and glory in what the world calls loss.
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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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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.