Quotes from Elizabeth Goudge

Fairyland...Paradise...In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.

And the written words were footsteps, feet running hard to another person.

I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can't, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God's help you can command your will when you can't command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn't appear to agree with us.

Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart.

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.

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.

It's not your business to decide if a woman you love should, or should not, marry you. It's her business. Tell her all about yourself and leave the decision to her. God knows it's trouble enough having to make one's own decisions in life without having to make other people's too.

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.

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.

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

Bringing up children, she thought, was like pouring ginger beer into a tumbler. All went well up to a certain point, and then it all frothed over the top.

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

If you think this life is all there is," he said, "then self-sacrifice must seem to you sheer insanity. If you do not think so then it is only common sense. It all depends on your point of view." (Hilary Eliot to David Eliot, Chapter 9)

She felt for the first time in her life, a sense of likeness with another human creature, and a sense of safety, not so much physical safety as the safety of understanding that comes between those who are two of a sort.

Peace....Henrietta was not quite sure what it was but she knew it was very important. If one wanted it, Grandfather had told her once, one must not hit back when fate hit hard but must allow the hammer-strokes to batter out a hollow place inside one into which peace, like cool water, could flow.

Insufficient nourishment in the early morning leads to pessimism and doubts.

The God who had thrust him through in the darkness with probings of dread and shame was the same God who now held out the sword and shield.

He knocked his pipe out. His paper rustled to the floor and his spectacles slid own his nose. His hands, red and shiny, lay relaxed on his knee. He abandoned himself to the quietness and the warmth of sun and fire. Autumn was a strange paradoxical time of the year. It was the season when he was happiest and yet it was the season when he was most vulnerable and most aware, and that was not always a happiness. Yet he liked autumn.

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.

but she knew also that what the world sees of the life of any human creature is not the real life; that life is lived in secret, a reality that moves behind the facade of appearance, like wind behind a painted curtain; only an occasional ripple of the surface, a smile, a sudden light or shadow passing on a face, surprising by its unexpectedness, gives news of something quite other than what is seen.

If in this life only we have hope....." By God, that was true, too. This quickening divine power that he had experienced could not be confined to this world, for cruel, sordid, ugly, devilish can be this world, and by the nature of things that power could have neither source nor ending in it; only flow through it, around it, over it, under it, gathering up the gold into its eternal shining and burning the dross in its fire.

And as for herself, if she could manage to welcome sorrow as readily as joy, it would shape her as deftly as joy could have to whatever beauty of being it was within her power to reach...

In what he suffered, as in all true suffering and in true joy, there was the quality of eternity. He could not believe it would ever end.

Nothing is ever over," said Jean. "You thread things on your life and think you've finished with them, but you haven't because it's like beads on a string and they come round again....