Quotes from The Scent of Water

“What is the scent of water?"
"Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“...your God is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, 'Lord, have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.' Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these, you will do well.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“Because of course she had known she must go. She always did the thing because in obedience lay the integrity that God asked of her. If anyone had asked her what she meant by integrity she would not have been able to tell them but she had seen it once like a picture in her mind, a root going down into the earth and drinking deeply there. No one was really alive without that root.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“If one's intellectual equipment was not great, one's spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one's very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“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, quote from The Scent of Water

“...this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and 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, quote from The Scent of Water

“What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer's mind below the surface? They'd think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see the witches' cauldron of images and memories boiling up from the subconscious, impressions whirling in from without, ideas and insights bursting up like bubbles and gone again before they can be seized. And the hopelessness of the business, the whole infuriating, exhausting, fascinating business of grabbing something out of the turmoil and imposing upon it some faint shadow or rumor of the order, pattern and rhythm of the world.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“How do you know I am capable of love?” she asked as they walked toward her car. “Steady affection perhaps.” “If by steady you mean faithful, there you have it; the kernel of love. I imagine men long for God because of that unchanging faithfulness. The rock under the quicksands. The Psalms are full of it.” When”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“always ailing though never with any specific”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“she loved him now as she had loved him at the beginning. To”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

“if I ceased to love him I should be dead inside, she answered, for it is I who love him, I myself,”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water

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