194 Quotes by Elizabeth Goudge

The storm had passed and the whole fen lay bathed in spent sunlight. Every stream and stretch of water among the rushes, which had been whipped and tormented by the storm, lay quiet now, reflecting the piled masses of white and silver clouds that floated like swans on the far deep pools of the sky. Every twig was strung with sparkling crystal drops, and every drop had a rainbow caught in its heart.

The other two with their happy, objective minds would always be absorbed in the moment but she would look backward and remember, and look forward and be afraid, and the present would always confuse her because she would never entirely live in it.

Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered.

It is when children start to question their happiness that they lose it and grow up.

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.

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.

The God who had thrust him through in the darkness with probings of dread and shame was the same God who now held out the sword and shield.

She would not rest until existence was for her a sucked orange. When there was no drop of juice left, then she would fling away the rind and die content.

Nothing is ever over,” said Jean. “You thread things on your life and think you’ve finished with them, but you haven’t because it’s like beads on a string and they come round again...