Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law as of all benign laws is fear.
Elizabeth Goudge
All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law as of all benign laws is fear.
Elizabeth Goudge
Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
Elizabeth Goudge
Peace ... was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self made possible.
Elizabeth Goudge
All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law as of all benign laws is fear.
Elizabeth Goudge
In the old days he had clutched life with such violence that the juice of it ran out between his fingers and was lost, but now he would touch it delicately, thankful for the good and accepting the ills with patience.
Elizabeth Goudge
Ferranti's thoughts had been his. As before he had understood his remorse so now he understood the mental chains that had imprisoned him. The poor wretch could not move. Misery had become apathy and apathy had brought the inevitable paralysis of the will.
Elizabeth Goudge
... 'Many waters cannot quench love' was said of divine, not human, love, which the Dean knew was not always tough enough to survive the indifference of misery. That was one of the chief reasons why he struggled to do away with misery.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.
Elizabeth Goudge
She knew that pleasure, to be pleasure, must come to an end.
Elizabeth Goudge
Don't waste hate on pink geranium.
Elizabeth Goudge
All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
There had come to him one of those moments of quiet despair that lie in wait for even the happiest. Stealthy-footed they leap upon us, as we walk along the street, as we sit at evening with fruit and wine upon the table and laughter on our lips, as we wake suddenly from sleep in the hour before dawn; neither at our work nor our play nor our prayers are we safe, those moments can leap at any time out of the blackness around human life and suddenly the colors that we have nailed to our mast are there no longer and all that we have grasped is dust.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You could not see it with your bodily eyes, that was all....the invisible world must be saturated with the stories that men tell both in their minds and by their lives. They must be everywhere, these stories, twisting together, penetrating existence like air breathed into the lungs, and how terrible, how awful, thought Henrietta, if the air breathed should be foul. How dare men live, how dare they think or imagine, when every action and every thought is a tiny thread to ar or enrich that tremendous tapestried story that man weaves on the loom that God has set up, a loom that stretches from heaven above to hell below, and from side to side of the universe...
Elizabeth Goudge
The way God squandered Himself had always hurt her; and annoyed her too. The sky full of wings and only the shepherds awake. That golden voice speaking and only a few fishermen there to hear; and perhaps some of the words He spoke carried away on the wind or lost in the sound of the waves lapping against the side of the boat. A thousand blossoms shimmering over the orchard, each a world of wonder all to itself, and then the whole thing blown away on a southwest gale as though the delicate little worlds were of no value at all. Well, of all the spendthrifts, she would think and then pull herself up. It was not for her to criticize the ways of Almighty God; if He liked to go to all that trouble over the snowflakes, millions and millions of them, their intricate patterns too small to be seen by human eyes, and melting as soon as made, that was His affair and not hers. All she could do about it was to catch in her window, and save from entire waste, as much of the squandered beauty as she could.
Elizabeth Goudge
The function of the educator is to discover in each individual child the gifts implanted in her by Almighty God and to develop and dedicate them to His service.
Elizabeth Goudge
Are you quite sure that you want to hear it?" he asked. "Sometimes, Maria, a story that one hears starts one off doing things that one would not have had to do if one had not heard it.
Elizabeth Goudge
In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.
Elizabeth Goudge
...there began to come to her a first dim realization of God's humility. Rejected by the proud in His own right by what humble means He chose to succor them; through the spirit of a child, a poor gypsy or an old man, by a song perhaps, or even it might be by the fall of a leaf or the scent of a flower. For His infinite and humble patience nothing was too small to advance His purpose of salvation and eternity was not too long for its accomplishment.
Elizabeth Goudge
In my opinion, too much attention to weather makes for instability of character.
Elizabeth Goudge
Imagine God and Man set down together to play that game of chess that we call life. The one player is a master, the other a bungling amateur, so the outcome of the game cannot be in question. The amateur has free will, he does what he pleases, for it was he who chose to set up his will against that of the master in the first place; he throws the whole board into confusion time and again and by his foolishness delays the orderly ending of it all for countless generations, but every stupid move of his is dealt with by a masterly counterstroke, and slowly but inexorably the game sweeps on to the master's victory. But, mind you, the game could not move on at all without the full complement of pieces; Kings, Queens, Bishops, Knights, Pawns; the master does not lose sight of a single one of them.
Elizabeth Goudge
Progress in evil was quick and easy; Apollyon was not a chap who hid himself and he gave every assistance in his power. The growth in goodness was so slow, at times so flat, so dull, and like the White Queen one had to run so fast to stay where one was, let alone progress; and there were few men who dared to say they had found God. It was easy to be a clever sinner, for the race to an earthly visible goal was short to run, so impossibly hard to be a wise saint, with the goal set at so vast a distance from this world and clouded with such uncertainty.
Elizabeth Goudge
For she had discovered that as well as the evil web there was another. This too bound spirits together, but not in a tangle, it was a patterned web and one could see the silver pattern when the sun shone upon it. It seemed much frailer than the dark tangle, that had a hideous strength, but it might not be so always, not in the final reckoning.
Elizabeth Goudge
What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer's mind below the surface? They'd think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see the witches' cauldron of images and memories boiling up from the subconscious, impressions whirling in from without, ideas and insights bursting up like bubbles and gone again before they can be seized. And the hopelessness of the business, the whole infuriating, exhausting, fascinating business of grabbing something out of the turmoil and imposing upon it some faint shadow or rumor of the order, pattern and rhythm of the world.
Elizabeth Goudge
Nothing mitigated failure except the knowledge that it did not matter.
Elizabeth Goudge
I mean, you may cause others a spot of bother by your weaknesses, perhaps, but coping with you may possibly increase their strength and sympathy. But if you sin deliberately, even if it seems only against yourself--well--you won't be the only one to suffer. You may even be the one who suffers least.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
I loathe, detest, hate and abominate the block, the gibbet, the rack, the pillory and the faggots with equal passion," said the old man vehemently. "Not only are they devilishly cruel but they are not even common sense. They do not lesson the evil in the world, they increase it, by making those who handle these cruelties as wicked as those who suffer them. No, I'm wrong, more wicked, for there is always some expiation made in the endurance of suffering and none at all in the infliction of it.
Elizabeth Goudge
He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
...accustomed like the white blackbird to the loneliness of eccentricity yet never quite reconciled to it, they found in each other's oddness a most comforting compatibility.
Elizabeth Goudge
Loneliness made or ruined a man. It frightened him so that he must either sing and build in the face of the dark, like a bird or a beaver, or hide from it like a beast in his den. There were perhaps always only the two ways to go, God or the jungle.
Elizabeth Goudge
We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear," he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.
Elizabeth Goudge
He sat for a long time and thought to himself that he wished he knew how to pray, yet he knew, untaught, how by abandonment of himself to let the quietness take hold of him.
Elizabeth Goudge
Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.
Elizabeth Goudge
Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.
Elizabeth Goudge
Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.
Elizabeth Goudge
Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important, but what one made.
Elizabeth Goudge
...whatever happens I'll not be afraid again; for, when you've once pushed through the place of torment to the peace beyond, you know that you can do it again. You know there's a strength somewhere that you can call upon. You've confidence.
Elizabeth Goudge
For a few minutes the anxiety that tormented him had vanished, leaving his mind as serene as the beauty he looked at. Very lovely, he thought, are the sudden moments of relief that come in the midst of strain, those moments of forgetfulness when we are "teased out of thought" by a bird or a flower or the sight of old roofs in the sun; lovely though so transient, the reversal of those brief moments of misery that visit us even in the midst of joy.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
He supposed he was one of those unfortunates born with a great capacity for suffering.... He opened his eyes a moment and they were dark with fear, for only one race was run as yet and there might be many others.... Then his newborn courage came back to him and he accepted his suffering as the price he must pay for the gift of creation that was his. And suffering, he had discovered, could be the gateway to renewal, than which no more glorious experience can be man's on earth.
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.
Elizabeth Goudge
Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.
Elizabeth Goudge
...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.
Elizabeth Goudge
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...
Elizabeth Goudge
...The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.
Elizabeth Goudge
...those who break the law should be loved more and not less for their sin, for if we do not forgive then is sin added to sin and the end is death.
Elizabeth Goudge
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.
Elizabeth Goudge
The years stretched before her, a long and dusty way, yet if she could walk humbly along it she might find that life, unfolding slowly, keeps its best secrets till the end.
Elizabeth Goudge
The sun is still there... even if clouds drift over it. Once you have experienced the reality of sunshine you may weep, but you will never feel ice about your heart again.
Elizabeth Goudge
The very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.
Elizabeth Goudge
What is the scent of water?""Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.
Elizabeth Goudge
Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.
Elizabeth Goudge
These black times go as they come and we do not know how they come or why they go. But we know that God controls them, as he controls the whole vast cobweb of the mystery of things.
Elizabeth Goudge