Quotes from Caryll Houselander

God is everywhere: yes, but how dim faith is, what a remote idea heaven is, in the modern world!

There is no way of learning of God except through the adventure of our own heart.

We are united to Him, we are one, and it is when His Passion becomes real to us, through experience and love, that we grow aware of His presence in us.

Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.

Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.

The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.

The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.

Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.

In this great fiat of the little girl Mary, the strength and foundation of our life of contemplation is grounded, for it means absolute trust in God, trust which will not set us free from suffering but will set us free from anxiety, hesitation, and above all from the fear of suffering. Trust which makes us willing to be what God wants us to be, however great or however little that may prove. Trust which accepts God as illimitable Love.

Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose in our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.

We do not have to discover in which of several people Christ is to be found; we must look for Him in them all. And not in an experimental spirit, to discover whether He is in them . . . but with the absolute certainty that He is. . . . Christ does not choose to be known through outward appearances—even the appearance of virtue.

I wanted to shut my mind, that my thoughts might close on my own peace, I wanted to close the peace of my love in my heart like dew in a dark rose." From "Philip Speaks

Light's glory is to dispel darkness. Christ has illumined you with wisdom and the fire of his presence. It has been sparked and kindled in you. Let it blaze.

In many people Christ lives the life of the Host. Our life is a sacramental life. This Host life is like the Advent life, like the life of the Child in the womb, the Child in the swaddling bands, the Christ in the tomb. It is a life of dependence upon creatures, of silence and secrecy, of hidden light. It is the life of a prisoner.

those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the pâtisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child.

When he is sick and you stand by the bedside shaken with fear, when he sleeps and you lean over him held by the amazement of seeing this little boy who has your life, God is there, too; indeed all this love of yours is only God's love which you sense vaguely. He, the true father, is there; He is around and above and below the child; He is in his heart. You only love at all because God loves infinitely more.

In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love.

Why must we be always seeking for the lost Child? Why must we be always feeling the pain of loss? If we did not, we should not realise that our idols are not God, are not Christ. Bad as they are, they match our limitations; and if they could content us, we should never know the real beauty of Christ:we should not become whole.

There is a possessiveness in the idealist's attitude . . . . "You are to be like me. I will shape you, or hammer you, into the shape of my ideal. You must enjoy my pleasures. Your tastes must coincide with mind. You must have only my values. You must be restricted by my limitations

The modern world's feverish struggle for unbridled, often unlicensed, freedom is answered by the bound, enclosed helplessness and dependence of Christ—Christ in the womb, Christ in the Host, Christ in the tomb.

No one can be so recollected, so tranquil, that he can be a contemplative in the world, a contemplative of Christ in his own heart, unless at the very outset he finds a cure for fear.

Every work that we do should be a part of the Christ forming in us which is the meaning of our life, to it we must bring the patience, the self-giving, the time of secrecy, the gradual growth of Advent. This Advent in work applies to all work, not only that which produces something permanent in time but equally to the making of a carving in wood or stone or of a loaf of bread. It applies equally to the making of a poem and to the sweeping of a floor.

We usually judge people by our own reactions fears, and desires. We do not see them as separate people . . . but as part of ourselves and our lives. We attribute to them motives which we would have in the same circumstances.

The emotions roused by that most unavoidable of things, food, are astonishing.