The Bird in the Tree Quotes

“If you think this life is all there is," he said, "then self-sacrifice must seem to you sheer insanity. If you do not think so then it is only common sense. It all depends on your point of view." (Hilary Eliot to David Eliot, Chapter 9)”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“He remembered suddenly, at this moment, as he looked at the squares of moonlight lying on the floor, the time when he had first realized that pain is a thing that we must face and come to terms with if life is to be lived with dignity an not merely muddled through like an evil dream... In some vague way he had understood that dark things are necessary; without them the silver moonlight would just stream away into nothingness, but with them it can be held and arranged into beautiful squares. (David Eliot, Chapter 4)”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“They were talking a lot just now about the war to end war, and a country fit for heroes to live in. She thought they deceived themselves. She had seen now what life could be, and what man could do when the devil was in him. She had not much hope of any wholesale change; only of the creation of isolated homes of beauty from which, please God, the loveliness should spread. Such a home she would make for her children and grandchildren. They should come to it weary and sickened and go away made new. They should find peace there, and beauty, and the cleansing of their sins.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“Acceptance of homage, she had found, gave no permanent satisfaction; it was better to give it; what is given to you you are always afraid will one day cease to be given but what you give you can give for ever. Life had taught her that at long last.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“Ellen had been so ready for the substance, so well equipped, with the right reactions to all the circumstances of a woman's life, while she, Lucilla, had been always questioning, always straining away from the things that she must meet and face. No, it was not fair, but yet, in this contradictory world, it seemed the normal thing. More often than not a human creature seemed cast for the role that suited him least. There was purpose here, perhaps. To swim with the stream was too easy; it was swimming against it that increased one's strength. But it had surely been hard on Ellen.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“There was a good deal to be said, Hilary decided, for middle age and infirmity. The years in which one demanded much of life were left behind, together with the bitterness of not getting what one wanted. One's values, too, were altered. Gifts that once one took for granted, sunshine and birdsong, freedom from pain, sleep and one's daily bread, seemed now so extraordinarily precious.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“(…) I had to struggle on by myself to the idea that if truth is the creation of perfection then it is action snd has nothing to do with feeling. And the nearest we can get to creating perfection in this world is to create good for the greatest number, for the community or the family, not just for ourselves; to create for ourselves only means misery and confusion for everybody. That made me see that acting a part is not always synonymous with lying, it is far more often the best way of serving the truth. It is more truthful to act what we should feel if the community is to be well served rather than behave as we actually do feel in our selfish private feelings.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“Do you think all beauty is just the evidence of things not seen, David?’ she had asked.
‘If it’s anything it’s that,’ he had said. ‘I should say that faith is the belief in something that you don’t understand yet, and beauty is the evidence that the thing is there”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“when she had been young she had borne her own troubles, now that she was old she bore her children’s and her grandchildren’s and found them far worse to put up with than her own had been.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and
loved makes better reading than something new and untried. The meeting with remembered and well-loved passages is like the continual greeting of old friends; nothing is so warming and companionable.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“There was a streak of austerity in him that welcomed hardship, and even, he imagined, was ready to welcome pain. It bred courage, it sifted the true from the false, and courage and truth were companions who would outpace all the others; when dreams had withered and happiness was forgotten they were still there. For their sakes he was prepared to suffer much himself and to see others suffer. Lucilla had been right to recognize in his face that night a hint of ruthlessness.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“She never slept very well because old people never do; especially when they have brought six children and eight grandchildren into a world that is not as good to them as they thought it was going to be.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“One would know the first cold breath of old age, she thought, when one found oneself in a world where there was no one left to whom one was a child.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“She had "green fingers" and knew them to be one of the happiest gifts that the gods can give.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“The value of little things was heightened by her enjoyment of them; the value of life itself was heightened because she had bought her knowledge of it with bitter sorrow and yet in her old age could wear it with such grace.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“The past, she knew, is inviolable, one of the few things in life that cannot be marred by present foolishness, and in it the present may find its peace.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“Though they were life of her life she regarded her adored grandchildren with a certain detachment. The gulf of time was so wide between them that she could not fully share their thoughts or their outlook, their torments or their battles, which were of their generation and not of hers; she could only love them and tend them and make for them a refuge to which they could fly when those same thoughts and struggles had wearied them beyond endurance.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“David could never come back to Damerosehay, Ben knew, without that shadow of a fear that something might have been changed and the old rapture of homecoming not be quite the same. Been understood. That was the worst of going away, like David had to. If you stayed at home, as he did, you knew that everything you loved was safe; day by day you watched over it, and if something had to change a little it changed so gradually that it did not hurt.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“Grandmother turned a little difficult and said no living gift could be received in future unless it was a vegetarian, and no mechanical gift unless it could refrain from calling attention to the passing of time by shrill noises in the night. Life fed on life, one knew, and time passed, but Grandmother did not wish her attention called to either distressing fact.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree

“It was because it was so full of white wings that Fairhaven was such a happy place; wings of the yachts, of the seagulls, and of the swans . . . . White wings are for ever happy, symbols of escape and ascent, of peace and of joy, and a spot of earth about which they beat is secure of its happiness.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree