“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
Elizabeth Goudge
Born place: in Wells, The United Kingdom
Born date April 24, 1900
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“You cannot write if you do not read,” the blind man said. “You cannot eat if you do not chew. And you cannot play if you do not”—he grabbed for the boy’s hand—“listen.”
― Mitch Albom, quote from The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“As we walked the streets together, cups of bitter coffee warming our hands, the present told its story all around us. The present has no need for us to do anything except exactly what we're doing. It's the past and future that needs our voices in order to live. So as we walked, as you spoke of yourself and your family, as you spoke of your past, I began to think of the future. I began to put us into a story. What happens after that first night is where I live sometimes, when I can gather enough of us together again, and this is how it goes.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“Gone for a while
Hoping, always, to return
If you will let me”
― Megan McCafferty, quote from Perfect Fifths
“A man doesn't have to be alive to start the fires of revolution.”
― quote from The Light of Eidon
“Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what a fine and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his breakfast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the blondwood table's surface trembling with sunlight and the man's hand steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evaluating the scene, and thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming performance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we first saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider – as I did, setting there at the breakfast nook – that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way, and at the same time still another facet or part of me realizing that from this perspective my own basic problem was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s quality and probable effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and affixing postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene), planning to drop it in a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds sufficient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steering wheel and instantly kill me. Self-loathing is not the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it instant’ (175-176)”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from Oblivion
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