Quotes from Elizabeth Goudge

There was a happy chirping in the cloakroom as the children put on their walking shoes. Mary, standing at the door, thought they might have been sparrows, so loud was the chirping and so fulfilled with satisfaction. Perhaps the purpose of sparrows, as of children let out of school, was just to remark loudly and with repetition that in spite of any appearance to the contrary everything is quite all right.

If happiness was now beyond his reach, he could at least know respite, and respite, with its lifelong rhythm, can in the awareness of it be called by the name of peace.

Love. The only indestructible thing. The only wealth and the only reality. The only survival. At the end of it all there was nothing else

It takes a happy marriage to make light of small things.

Mrs. Loraine's] sweet lips folded themselves into a straight line, and Stella thought briefly how odd it was that thinking differently about God tended to make even the nicest people not very sympathetic towards each other.

It's been a happy partnership." "It's been like dew coming down on dry earth, or like dead bones living.

I was thinking of moments of respite. One can't get the most out of them unless one treats them as one treats the next thing; as though it were the only thing. I mean, if you think about the toothache that has just stopped, it so easily becomes the toothache that is going to begin again, and all your peace is lost.

When the demon was muscling for action she was like the princess in the fairy tale from whose mouth toads fell. The small part of her which remained outside the dominion of her temper stood aghast but inefficient as one after the other the reptiles showered forth.

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.

What we are made to do we seldom do well, what we do of our own choice we make a success of for very pride.

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.

So when it happened suddenly this was how it happened. She had often wondered. But the magazine stories had got it all wrong. It was not an affair of sudden heartbeats, and hot and cold flushes, as though one were going to have influenza, it was just this quiet recognition. But in the approach of love there must be a sharpness, for that moment of beauty that had come down like a sword had cut her life in two. When she crossed the bridge she had crossed from her girlhood to womanhood.

She was shamed. Women like herself, sheltered, indulged, secure, beloved; and yet they dared to find life hard, they dared to pity themselves because the path they trod was strewn with pink rose-petals when their own choice would have been crimson. She hated herself. Her hatred choked her, and she could not speak.

It was usual for Gervas Leigh to lose everything not actually attached to his person by a string, the habit of dissociation from material things being the first to be acquired by men of saintly character.

What in the world was she saying? Not what she ought to be saying. She was repeating the verse of some old Elizabethan poet whom she had read in the days when she had been a cultured young woman of the world who had prided herself upon her cosmopolitan reading. Yes, she had been young once, young and beautiful—and warm. And now

Though they were life of her life she regarded her adored grandchildren with a certain detachment. The gulf of time was so wide between them that she could not fully share their thoughts or their outlook, their torments or their battles, which were of their generation and not of hers; she could only love them and tend them and make for them a refuge to which they could fly when those same thoughts and struggles had wearied them beyond endurance.

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.

He had thought of her poise as being that of a woman of experience, and been a little afraid of it, he saw it now as the self-confidence of a girl whose adolescent pride had never been shattered. And now it had been shattered, by humble old Harriet of all people, and they could start again together....

Hers was the unconscious tyranny of inexorable great expectations.

The past, she knew, is inviolable, one of the few things in life that cannot be marred by present foolishness, and in it the present may find its peace.

It was always a cheerful street, for the people who lived in it were the happiest sort of people: not too poor, the joy of life ground out of them by poverty, and not too rich, feeling burdened by possessions; and the dead had left some of their happiness behind them in the homes they had made, and the living were daily adding to it out of their own good cheer.

she loved him now as she had loved him at the beginning. To

Shout when you're ready for some devastating criticism," said John Adair.

The desolation in her voice seemed to open a sort of pit at Nadine's feet. She was shamed. Women like herself, sheltered, indulged, secure, beloved, and yet they dared to find life hard; they dared to pity themselves because the path they trod was strewn with pink rose petals when their own choice would have been crimson. She hated herself. Her hatred choked her and she could not speak.