Quotes from Elizabeth Goudge

Be at peace now and let the tide carry you into calm water. That is all you have to do for the moment. God bless you.

Love still owned him, steered him, drew him to itself.

Firelight and Polly had lent a momentary charm to the parlor but now, looking up at the portrait, he was aware of having passed under the shadow of a dark hand. Emma, he realized, lived under it always. Her parlor was her past, and Isaac's, and if Issac in tearing himself out of its grip had torn himself too he was better off with his asthma and his nerves and his eccentricity than Emma. Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.

His hostess was one of those women who even in an overcrowded room can create a sense of spaciousness.

She knew that pleasure, to be pleasure, must come to an end.

I will," that is my song. I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can't, and you hate yourself because 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.

To search for colours, fumble for words, Strive to catch in earthly song The echo of greater music, To fail with heartbreak and give The heartbreaks to each other with our love, Can this be why we live?

Illness was admirable training in the creative art of grateful acceptance. Pain accepted was just pain, and heavy, but Harriet believed that pain gladly accepted took wings, went somewhere and did something.

She had that transparent honesty and purity and serenity that like clear water flooding over the bed of a stream washes away uncleanness, and makes fresh and divinely lovely all that is seen through its own transparency. We see the world through the medium of our own characters, and Marguerite saw and loved all things through her own bright clarity, and enjoyed them enormously.

She had taken to herself her mother's fair beauty and as much—and no more—of her father's intelligence as it was desirable that a pretty child should have, and to them some good fairy had added something else, the best of all gifts, the power of enjoyment, not just animal enjoyment of good health and good spirits but that authentic love of life that sees good days.

There was nothing in her immediate ancestry to account for her. There was no explaining her except by the theory that some fierce spark of endeavor, lit by a forgotten pioneer ancestor, had lived on in the contented stuff of succeeding generations until the wind of a new age whipped it into a flame that was called Marianne Le Patourel. . . . Or by the theory propounded by the peasant nurse of her babyhood, who had vowed she was a changeling.

What a dimple! It was years since Mère Madeleine had set eyes on a child, though she had prayed for them so unceasingly.

Those upon whom her eyes rested immediately thought the world of themselves, for it was obvious that she saw with one glance all the good in them to which their own families seemed so strangely blind.

Cleanliness is next to godliness is an old wives' saying but there's a lot in it. It wouldn't surprise me if one slid down the road to Hell all the quicker if it's slimy with grease; kitchen grease and the grease of an unwashed skin.

Suffering had had an effect with which she was familiar. The refusal of self-pity and despair had turned it from lead to fire, burning up the subterfuges and dishonesties below the surface of the inherited veneer of manners and thought that most men and women think are their true selves, and the veneer with them.

Unlike Job's comforters he believed there was a supreme goodness that could renew his own soul beyond this wasting sorrow of human life and death.

It was the chief thing he knew about women: that they could always be calmed down by the fact, or even by the prospect, of a cup of tea.

People talk a lot of ballyhoo about suffering improving you. I should say that what it does is to underline what you were before.

We cannot change the sort of person that we are.

The whole width of the kitchen separated the well-dressed from the ill-dressed and it was the well-dressed, weighed down by numbers, who felt themselves at a disadvantage. What makes one feel uncomfortable, they discovered suddenly, is not what one has got or has not got, but being different.

Evening fell, there were lights here and there upon the ships, scattered lights on the shore, faint lights in the sky, and still the silence was unbroken and the peace profound. Those on shore saw phantom ships upon the sea now, and those on board saw phantom white villages gleaming along the shore, and after the habit of human kind each man yearned to be where the other was, and saw in the place where he was not his heart's desire.

An embittered mind colors the world black for its owner yet that does not alter the fact that the world is a treasure house of beauty and love.

They are truly peacemakers who amidst all they suffer in this world maintain peace in soul and body for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ. WRITINGS OF SAINT FRANCIS

Life was full of these intuitions that one must get smaller, go further in. The golden box was so deeply within that it was hard to find, yet it contained an entire country and was, she supposed, the only luggage one could take with one if there was anywhere to go beyond death.