Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
-
Autumn days have a holiness that spring lacks ... They are like old serene saints for whom death has lost its terror.
-
Our home, our special country, is for all of us the place where we find liberation; a very difficult word ... that tries to describe something that can't be described but is the only thing worth having.
-
Sensible fathers and mothers, when their children marry, go back to the old days and renew their youth.
-
Reality as one knew it was what claimed one's allegiance. Deepening experience might change one's conception of it but until that happened the life one knew was the life one had to live.
-
Given belief in God, a good digestion and a mind in working order life's still a thing to be grateful for.
-
In my opinion, too much attention to weather makes for instability of character.
-
The heaven had cried out for joy, and the earth had answered, and between the two the smell of the gorse rose up like ascending prayer and linked them together. Music and scent were alive once more in the world; only color tarried, waiting upon the sun.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Shame could wrench just as fear did. Thinking how other men would have behaved in his place was the most searching form of humiliation that he knew; and he knew a good many.
-
Without faith your mind gets fouled. Look at Cervantes. He was a man of faith and nothing fouled Cervantes, not even war and slavery. He wrote the first part of Don Quixote in prison.
-
Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered.
-
Marriage is a very long process.
-
Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.
-
Acting a part is not always synonymous with lying; it is far often the best way of serving the truth. It is more truthful to act what we should feel if the community is to be well served rather than behave as we actually do feel in our selfish private feelings.
-
I don't think there's anything more tiring ... than expecting people who don't turn up.
-
"Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it".
-
Someone once said to me,said Marguerite, that our home, our special country, is where we find liberation. I suppose she meant that it is where our souls find it easiest to escape from self, and it seem to me that it is that way with us when what is about us echoes the best that we are.
-
One is seldom unchanged by the death of those one loves. It gives me a deeper knowledge of them, and so of oneself in regard to them.
-
In the old days he had clutched life with such violence that the juice of it ran out between his fingers and was lost, but now he would touch it delicately, thankful for the good and accepting the ills with patience.
-
The sun is still there... even if clouds drift over it. Once you have experienced the reality of sunshine you may weep, but you will never feel ice about your heart again.
-
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.
-
...those who break the law should be loved more and not less for their sin, for if we do not forgive then is sin added to sin and the end is death.
-
So 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.