Elizabeth Goudge
15 quotes
Biography
Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge FRSL was an English writer of fiction and children's books. She won the Carnegie Medal for British children's books in 1946 for The Little White Horse.
"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."
"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."
"...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."
"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."
"In this world death has a habit of intervening before we can pay our debts, and the only thing to be done is to pay them to another."
"A sense of identity is the gift of love, and only love can give it."
"For unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering."
"Life is a reaching out for something or someone. That is its definition."
"There was something disruptive about Christmas and not only in the merely material way. The original Christmas had proved exceedingly disrupting to the entire world and the tremors of the original event vibrated through every life year by year."
"Faith given back to us after a night of doubt is a stronger thing, and far more valuable to us than faith that has never been tested."
"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."
"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."
"Peace ... was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self made possible."
"Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing."
"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."