Elizabeth Goudge Quotations

Faith given back to us after a night of doubt is a stronger thing, and far more valuable to us than faith that has never been tested.

Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.

All we are asked to bear we can bear.

Butterflies... not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.

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.

She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.

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.

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.

Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.

There was a good deal to be said, Hilary decided, for middle age and infirmity. The years in which one demanded much of life were left behind, together with the bitterness of not getting what one wanted. One's values, too, were altered. Gifts that once one took for granted, sunshine and birdsong, freedom from pain, sleep and one's daily bread, seemed now so extraordinarily precious.

A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.

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 my opinion, too much attention to weather makes for instability of character.

Don't waste hate on pink geranium.

But a hare, now, that is a different thing altogether. A hare is not a pet but a person. Hares are clever and brave and loving, and they have fairy blood in them. It’s a grand thing to have a hare for a friend.

...The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.

The whole universe was stilled as if listening for a voice. For the space of one heartbeat there was peace on earth. For one fraction of a moment there was no deed of violence wrought on earth, no hatred, no fire, no whirlwind, no pain, no fear. Existence rested against the heart of God, then sighed and journeyed again.

We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear," he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.

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.

Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.

What is the scent of water?" "Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.

There is always something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule.

I have known him nearly all my life, and I am going to marry him, so that there won't ever be a time when I shan't know him.

What is the distinguishing mark of an aristocrat?' she asked him suddenly.'Reverence,' he replied.

Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.

to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.

[Salvation] is a curious process of divine burglary. The first thing to be wrested from one by a God who said 'Thou shalt not steal' is one's good opinion of one's self.

Sensible fathers and mothers, when their children marry, go back to the old days and renew their youth.

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.

marriage is a very long process ...

The lovers of life, they are children at heart always in their wonder and delight, but they do not grab.

The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.

There's much that goes to the makin' of a man or woman into somethin' better than a brute beast, but there's three things in chief, an' they're the places where life sets us down, an' the folks life knocks us up against, an' -- not the things ye get, but the things ye don't get.

This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority - headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor - ever since it took hold the world's gone steadily downhill.

cowardice more than any other failing demands a ruthless paying of the price from those who give it hospitality.

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.

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.

The elements were "seeking" each other in rage and confusion, and in the fury of the conflict boastful man was utterly humiliated, sucked down, drowned.

To be sorry and glad together is to be perceptive to the richness of life.

I doubt if we nuns are really as self-sacrificing as we must seem to be to you who live in the world. We don't give everything for nothing, you know. The mystery plays fair.

Cleanliness', chuckled Sir Benjamin, noting his great niece's delighted smile as her eyes rested upon him, 'comes next to godliness, eh, Maria?

If you lose your reason, you lose it into the hands of God....It's the only place where anything is safe. And when you're dead it's only what's there you'll have. Nothing else.

Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people - those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food;

Peace ... was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul, a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self made possible.

I don't think there's anything more tiring ... than expecting people who don't turn up ...

Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.

...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.

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.

All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.

Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You may think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth; but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.

There always comes, I think, a sort of peak in suffering at which either you win over your pain or your pain wins over you, according as to whether you can, or cannot, call up that extra ounce of endurance that helps you to break through the circle of yourself and do the hitherto impossible. That extra ounce carries you through 'le dernier quart d' heure.' Psychologist have a name for it, I believe. Christians call it the Grace of God.

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.

If one's intellectual equipment was not great, one's spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one's very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.

In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.

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; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side.

For she had discovered that as well as the evil web there was another. This too bound spirits together, but not in a tangle, it was a patterned web and one could see the silver pattern when the sun shone upon it. It seemed much frailer than the dark tangle, that had a hideous strength, but it might not be so always, not in the final reckoning. (The Child from the Sea)

autumn days have a holiness that spring lacks ... They are like old serene saints for whom death has lost its terror.

[I]f 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.

He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.

He grinned at her, and she grinned at him, and it seemed to Maria that suddenly the sun came out.

The child in us is always there, you know, and it's the best part of us, the winged part that travels farthest.

Not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.

Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance

As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist that make an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street itself.

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.

All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.

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.

she had long 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. When you expect to be happy you are not, when you don't expect to be happy there's suddenly Easter in your soul, though it be midwinter.

Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...