Quotes from Elizabeth Goudge

And then the captains of merchant ships can take their wives to sea with them if they wish, and in the Navy they're not allowed to." "I shouldn't want to take my wife to sea with me," said William. "A wife would be fearfully in the way." Marianne gritted her teeth. Oh, to be a man, and not to be dependent upon the whim of a man to live!

I think it would be advisable, Mamma," said Marianne. "We need the exercise." She spoke primly in her quiet, hard little voice, her clear brain leading her to make unerring attack upon the maternal sense of duty rather than the maternal affections.

If you can't marry the man you love, then the next best thing is to marry one who is easily managed. . . . But the best thing of all, of course, is to marry a man beloved as well as manageable, as she herself intended to do.

what I seek is the goodness of God that waters the dry places. And water overflows from one dry patch to another, and so you cannot be selfish in digging for it.

Her strong, warm clasp did not falter, but her panic grew. An abyss seemed opening at her feet too, as for the first time in her life she realized the meaning of death. However strong religious faith may be, death remains an abyss that swallows the familiar companion of everyday as though he had never been. It is the most awful fact of human life, and at the moment Marianne knew it not only with her mind but for the first time with her panic-stricken soul as well.

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

But she was not idle while she waited, because she was holding herself in readiness for whatever it was that she would have to do. She was trying not to be frightened in her mind, and she found that that sort of waiting and thinking really keep a person quite busy.

What is the scent of water?" "Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew. Mary, it is most alarming, the way you make me talk. I don't talk to anyone else as I do to you. I'd be ashamed to." Mary was suddenly aware of wealth and when he asked her again, "Well, are you happy?" she replied with absolute truth, "Yes, I am.

But she learned in two hours what most girls of her age would only have learned in two weeks, for she was without fear, and after each tumble she was up again, dizzy and bruised yet laughing, and back in the saddle almost before Sir Benjamin had time to draw rein.

Why shouldn't it last? We are living in the age of progress, William. Mankind is progressing." To which remark William had always replied with the irritating question, "What to?

You're mad, you missionaries,' ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. 'What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world's ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?' Brother Balaam jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the church behind him. 'Ye'll get no civilization worth havin' in a new country unless ye lay down a few martyrs' bones for a foundation,' he said. 'They generate. Slow but sure.

He was her mate, her fairy lover, her perfect complement. She could not analyze her feelings but she knew that she loved him with her whole heart and soul and would until she died.

She had wondered once if the human love she had longed for, and now knew, was symbolic and she realized with the approach of Christmas that the love of God contains the human power of love in its supernatural state. It was that that burst forth two thousand years ago and disrupted the world like a tidal wave.

William eyed Tai Haruru with a certain apprehension. It struck him that in this country the men, as well as the landscape, ran to extremes. Samuel, now, was almost tedious in his insistence upon the fact of the immortal soul; Tai Haruru on the contrary seemed likely to harp unnecessarily upon its absence.

and one knew her to be sound and sweet right through, like a ripe nut.

Reality as one knew it was what claimed one's allegiance. Deepening experience might change one's conception of it but until that happened the life one knew was the life one had to live.

And so on that stormy autumn evening Sophie Le Patourel took the lives of William and Marianne and Marguerite and knotted them together forever.

How do you know I am capable of love?" she asked as they walked toward her car. "Steady affection perhaps." "If by steady you mean faithful, there you have it; the kernel of love. I imagine men long for God because of that unchanging faithfulness. The rock under the quicksands. The Psalms are full of it." When

To some people fighting in itself is enjoyable, and she supposed that the fighters of this world can always get some sort of a kick out of things.

looking into his face I noticed that when he was neither eager nor alarmed his eyes had the most extraordinary quietness in them. "My dear," he said, "love, your God, is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, 'Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.' Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these you will do well.

So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

It was because it was so full of white wings that Fairhaven was such a happy place; wings of the yachts, of the seagulls, and of the swans . . . . White wings are for ever happy, symbols of escape and ascent, of peace and of joy, and a spot of earth about which they beat is secure of its happiness.

This gathering of one's back hair inside a large net, the new style of hairdressing that William and Tai Haruru had failed to notice on the last peaceful evening at the settlement, was excellently adapted for civil war in the primeval forest, she thought, though possibly the Parisian hairdresser who had devised the fashion had been unaware of the fact.

Marguerite was not so sure. What did human beings know about anything? Their own existence was still a mystery to them, and of the existences beyond their own they knew about as much as field mice know of the world above the heads of the bending ears of corn.