“Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people - those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food;”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“Robin: When you do marry, who will you marry?
Maria: I have not quite decided yet, but I think I shall marry a boy I knew in London.
Robin(yells): What? Marry some mincing nincompoop of a Londoner with silk stockings and a pomade in his hair and face like a Cheshire cheese? You dare do such a thing! You - Maria - if you marry a London man I'll wring his neck! (...) I'll not only wring his neck, I'll wring everybody's necks, and I'll go right away out of the valley, over the hills to the town where my father came from, and I won't ever come back here again. So there!
(...)
Maria: Why don't you want me to marry that London boy?
Robin(shouting): Because you are going to marry me. Do you hear, Maria? You are going to marry me.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“There is always something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You may think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth; but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“In my opinion, too much attention to weather makes for instability of character.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“...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, quote from The Little White Horse
“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, quote from The Little White Horse
“Don't waste hate on pink geranium.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“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, quote from The Little White Horse
“Give me the benefit of your assistance during those ablutions that neccessarily, though unfortunatly, invariably follow the excercise of the culinary art.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“She could only wait. But she was not idle while she waited, because she was holding herself in readiness for whatever it was that she would have to do. She was trying not to be frightened in her mind, and she found that that sort of waiting and thinking really keep a person quite busy.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“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, quote from The Little White Horse
“...pero no era sólo que rayara el alba, sino que el silencio también se había roto. A lejos, tenue y misterioso, se presentía el ruido del mar.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“Por el este, donde estaba el mar y por donde habría de salir el sol, la luz se acercaba con sigilo tratando de internarse en el bosque como una neblina, y a medida que aumentaba la claridad lo hacía también el ruido del mar. De pronto, la luz pareció tomar forma. Dentro de ella había sombras que se movían, constituidas por otra luz aún más brillante. Eran cientos de caballos blancos al galope, con largas y sueltas crines y elegantes cuellos curvados como los de los caballos de ajedrez que había en la sala de estar. Sus cuerpos, que avanzaban a la velocidad de la luz, estaban hechos de una materia más etérea que del arco iris-”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Little White Horse
“And then I cried a flood of tears as if I really were a mermaid who had absorbed too much sea into herself. The tears spilled like a balm, like a potion, like a charm. In them swam a little girl whose father was dying without ever having seen her. In them swam a girl whose mother’s magic – the only thing the girl envied more than anything else in the world, the thing that had made her invisible, the most precious thing –might be dying too. In them swam a green-haired girl who had never been touched by the boy to whom she was so devoted that she would have lived with him forever in a shack by the sea or a ruined sand castle even if he never made love to her. My tears were for me, but they were also for him. They were to wash away the thing that had frightened him so much so long ago. The wound inside his thigh. My tears poured out of me and he drank them down his throat. He drank them in gulps deep into himself, swallowing sorrow.
Someday,” he said, “when we are ready, I will give you back your tears.”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“Time and again the people still in the camp, realizing they were now trapped, called to God in a hundred different dialects. He laughed and cried at once. He had so many names, yet could not answer to any of them.”
― Ron Currie Jr., quote from God Is Dead
“There are only a very few cop clichés that are necessary for saying almost anything to the press. That is one reason, of course, that a talking suit like Captain Matthews could become good enough at it to rise up to his lofty rank based solely on his ability to memorize them all and then put them in the right order when standing in front of a camera. It was really not even a skill, since it took a great deal less ability than the simplest card trick. Still, it was a talent Deborah did not have, not even a little, and trying to explain it to her was like describing plaid to a blind person. Altogether it was a nasty and unpleasant interlude, and by the time we headed down to the press conference I was nearly as sweaty and frazzled as my sister. Neither of us felt any better when we saw the standing-room-only crowd of salivating predators waiting for us. For a moment Deborah froze in place, one foot raised in the air. But then, as if somebody had flipped a switch, the reporters turned on her and began their routine of shouting questions and taking pictures, and as I saw Deborah clamp her jaw and frown, I took a deep breath. She’s going to be all right, I thought, and I watched her climb to the podium with something like pride in my creation. Of”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dexter Is Delicious
“…A city deprived of everything, devoid of light and devoid of heat, starved, and still not crushed.”
― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
“I told her how I thought you could always revise your life, how you could work and work on it, finesse the details, see if what you're saying is what you wanted to be saying.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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