Top 100 Elizabeth Goudge Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “And as for herself, if she could manage to welcome sorrow as readily as joy, it would shape her as deftly as joy could have to whatever beauty of being it was within her power to reach...”

— Elizabeth Goudge

52. “Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

53. “I have known him nearly all my life, and I am going to marry him, so that there won’t ever be a time when I shan’t know him.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

54. “She lived too close to despair to have any strength left for self-knowledge. She might have been able to acknowledge herself unloved but to know herself unloving was beyond her strength.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

55. “There are some people who don’t realize what it is they are doing to others until they are paid back in their own coin. But those are not the worst. The worst are those whose unkindness is calculated.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

56. “And the written words were footsteps, feet running hard to another person.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

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

— Elizabeth Goudge

58. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

59. “One was born a certain sort of person, and though by ceasless struggle one might become as nice as that sort of person ever is, one could never become as nice as a nicer sort of person.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

60. “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

61. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

62. “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

63. “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

64. “She had that transparent honesty and purity and serenity that like clear water flooding over the bed of a stream washes away uncleanness, and makes fresh and divinely lovely all that is seen through its own transparency. We see the world through the medium of our own characters, and Marguerite saw and loved all things through her own bright clarity, and enjoyed them enormously.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

65. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

66. “Nothing mitigated failure except the knowledge that it did not matter.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

67. “Is a man less of a man, because he’s learned to hold his tongue?”

— Elizabeth Goudge

68. “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

69. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

70. “He was a convinced but hardworked rationalist, always hard at it re-convincing himself of his convictions.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

71. “She knew little about herself and consequently little about others.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

72. “When he had first come to Mr. Peabody he had not wanted to look back. He had felt like someone just awake after a nightmare, and afraid to think about it lest it catch him again, but now the evil had receded so far that he liked to set it as a backcloth to the procession of his shining days.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

73. “Love still owned him, steered him, drew him to itself.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

74. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

75. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

76. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

77. “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

78. “Bringing up children, she thought, was like pouring ginger beer into a tumbler. All went well up to a certain point, and then it all frothed over the top.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

79. “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

80. “The scent of a flower is a very close and intimate thing, she thought. It can seem to be a part of your body and blood.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

81. “Fear is a lonely thing. Even those who love us best cannot get close to us when we are afraid.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

82. “They gazed at her with awe, feeling to the full that medieval reverence for someone obviously touched in the head.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

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

— Elizabeth Goudge

84. “Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

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

— Elizabeth Goudge

86. “The elements were “seeking” each other in rage and confusion, and in the fury of the conflict boastful man was utterly humiliated, sucked down, drowned.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

87. “She had no beauty to commend her apart from the sweetness of her smile and the kindliness of her round brown eyes, but she carried with her wherever she went that aura of almost heavenly motherliness which so often shines about a woman who has borne only one child, and in losing it has become mother to all the world, shining more wonderfully than about the mother of a dozen.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

88. “I don’t fly to the classics for comfort, as Giles does. I’m too frivolous. Worthy people always read the classics when things are difficult.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

89. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

90. “She had the courage that accepts instantly, without recoil, and the reverence in love that towards man is without possessiveness and towards God without rebellion.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

91. “In my opinion, too much attention to weather makes for instability of character.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

92. “A Princess called to rule a kingdom must know it through and through, if she is to reign worthily. And how can she know it, if she is not given the freedom of it?”

— Elizabeth Goudge

93. “Cleanliness’, chuckled Sir Benjamin, noting his great niece’s delighted smile as her eyes rested upon him, ’comes next to godliness, eh, Maria?”

— Elizabeth Goudge

94. “A man may build as he chooses upon his foundations but he cannot change them or forget them, and if at the last the superstructure of his own building falls about his ears he tends to rediscover them at the end as the only rock he has to cling to.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

95. “Insufficient nourishment in the early morning leads to pessimism and doubts.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

96. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

97. “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

98. “She had known then that there were things one was more afraid of being without with ease than possessing with pain.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

99. “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

100. “Shame could wrench just as fear did. Thinking how other men would have behaved in his place was the most searching form of humiliation that he knew; and he knew a good many.”

— Elizabeth Goudge