194 Quotes by 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.

I don’t think fear that you share with the whole world warps you. It’s personal fears that do that.

I doubt if we nuns are really as self-sacrificing as we must seem to be to you who live in the world. We don’t give everything for nothing, you know. The mystery plays fair.

It got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They couldn’t do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone.

One thing however, Nat did for him. He taught him carpentry. He learned to distinguish between the different kinds of wood, to love them and understand their ways. Realizing that the boy had great skill with his hands Nat gave him a few tools for his own and taught him wood carving... First the books and then the wood. Each was a milestone for him on the way through.

He felt him transfixed, captured, nailed by his vow to the hard wood of the impossible thing he had to do.

Only at the very center of pain or joy was one wholly wretched, wholly joyful. There was only one hour of the night in which sunset or dawn was not present to the mind in memory or hope, only one hour of the day when the sun seemed neither rising nor declining, and the intensity of those hours dulled and blinded.

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.

Proud folk separate themselves from others, judging them... To criticize others we must hold them from us, at arm’s length so to speak. And then before you know where you are you’ve pushed them away and you’re the poorer.