Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

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

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 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.

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

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

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

Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance

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

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

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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Don't waste hate on pink geranium.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

All we are asked to bear we can bear.

Marriage is a very long process.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

"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".

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

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

Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.

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.

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

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.

...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.