Gentian Hill Quotes

“Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“There was a leap of joy in him, like a flame lighting up in a dark lantern. At this moment he believed it was worth it. This moment of supreme beauty was worth all the wretchedness of the journey. It was always worth it. "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." It was the central truth of existence, and all men knew it, though they might not know that they knew it. Each man followed his own star through so much pain because he knew it, and at journey's end all the innumerable lights would glow into one.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“I think God creates what one might call spiritual families, people who may or may not be physically related to each other, but who will travel together the whole of the way. And it's a long way.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“...how to deal with fear.

To begin with, don't fight it, accept it without shame, just as you would accept any other limitation you happen to be born with, like a cast in the eye or a lame foot. Willing acceptance is half the battle... Be willing to be afraid, don't be afraid of your fear... every man has within him a store of strength, both physical and spiritual, of which he is utterly unaware until the moment of crisis. You will not tap it until the moment of crisis, but you can be quite certain that when that moment comes it will not fail you.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“...you don't have to know just what people are doing and feeling to be of assistance to them. Your own life seems to you like a very small lighted room, with great darkness all around it, and you can't see out into the darkness and know what is happening there. But light and warmth from your room can go out into the darkness if you don't have the windows selfishly curtained, keep a brave fire burning, and light all the happy candles you can.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“She felt for the first time in her life, a sense of likeness with another human creature, and a sense of safety, not so much physical safety as the safety of understanding that comes between those who are two of a sort.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“But no, he did not believe in capricious fortune, but in a carefully woven pattern where every tightly stretched warp thread of pain laid the foundation for a woof thread of joy.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“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, Gentian Hill

“Everyone needed someone in the world who was like his other hand. You can't hold much or do much with one hand only. It is with both hands that a man lifts the garnered gold of the wheatsheaf and the brimming bowl of milk, with both hands that he builds his house, with both hand, clasped together, that he prays.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“Fear is a lonely thing. Even those who love us best cannot get close to us when we are afraid.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“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, Gentian Hill

“His hunger for knowledge gave him no rest, it was both his bane and his joy.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“While they poured their troubles into the comforting depth of his comprehending silence, he watched their faces in the soft light that shone through the spotless muslin curtains in the window, and learned more from the shadows around the eyes and the play of expression about the mouth than he did from the flow of confused words. Yet he listened attentively while he watched, quick to detect alike the hesitant truth and the glib evasion, and though he was impatient by nature, he never interrupted until the last word had been uttered. He knew how a flow of words, like a flow of blood, can wash away poison.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“They were accustomed to think of the Abbé as one of those men who pass rapidly from point to point, from task to task, so intent on redeeming the time because the days are evil that they have no leisure to pause and enquire if perhaps the bad days have a few good points about them after all.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“His hostess was one of those women who even in an overcrowded room can create a sense of spaciousness.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“He felt him transfixed, captured, nailed by his vow to the hard wood of the impossible thing he had to do.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“The fires of youth are not dead in old age... only banked down.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“...a subtle form of temptation, very likely to attack one during a wakeful hour of the night when vitality is at its lowest. Because it suddenly seems impossible to go on, values are abruptly turned upside down. To endure--which perhaps a mere half hour before was the right and obvious thing to do--is now presented to the mind as simply ridiculous; escape, which would have seemed despicable a little while ago, now seems to be the only sane course of action. The experienced man knows that it is not impossible to go on because one thinks it is, that you can always go on in some manner while the power of choice remains. This sudden reversal of the values is a temptation to preordain the moment when a man can no longer make his choice, and his responsibility for what happens next must be laid down. Faced with it, the experienced man once more chooses to come to grips with the impossible and finds it possible.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“[Mrs. Loraine's] sweet lips folded themselves into a straight line, and Stella thought briefly how odd it was that thinking differently about God tended to make even the nicest people not very sympathetic towards each other.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“Every now and then he [Sol] made these cryptic remarks, gazing into the fire or at Stella with his bright amused eyes. She did not understand him, and he had no words to explain what he knew. It was only by the tranquillity with which he carried the burden of things as they are that he could reveal his innate knowledge that the hands that had put it upon him were the hands of love.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“He [Zachary] knew now that every kind of life and situation holds somewhere within it for the finding its own kernel of quiet, each small possession of mortal peace a symbol of the eternal fortress and a door to it. He would be able to hold on now through the months of storm, remembering the days of peace at the heart of them to which the way was sure.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“The Abbé was no believer in too much intimacy. Human beings, precariously making their souls, could not press in too closely upon each other without damage, he thought. The instinct for fusion was one of those immortal longings whose complete satisfaction was not for this life.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“Very well then' said the doctor, and he leaned back in his chair, stuck his feet on the fender, and opened to Zachary, as to so many before him in this room, the comforting depth of his comprehending silence.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“Home! It showed you its face when you sat quiet within it at that moment when day was passing to night, but it could only reveal its spirit, its eternal meaning, when you stood at a little distance, just turning to leave it or just returning to it, seeing it at that transition moment when a larger world was claiming or releasing you.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“This was probably one of those many queer experiences that human beings could not speak of to each other, because though words could be formed into a casket to hold visions, and could be at the same time the power that liberated them, they seemed of little use when one tried to use them to explain to another person what it was they had set free. Words were queer things, Stella decided, to be at once so powerful and so weak.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“and one knew her to be sound and sweet right through, like a ripe nut.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“Evening fell, there were lights here and there upon the ships, scattered lights on the shore, faint lights in the sky, and still the silence was unbroken and the peace profound. Those on shore saw phantom ships upon the sea now, and those on board saw phantom white villages gleaming along the shore, and after the habit of human kind each man yearned to be where the other was, and saw in the place where he was not his heart’s desire.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“In one life only had the fighting, the healing, the teaching, the praying, and the suffering held equal and perfect place, and that life could never on earth be lived again. For some dying men, he thought, there would have been comfort in the old belief that a soul comes back to earth again and again, the fighter returning to pray and the teacher to heal. Once he had half believed that himself, but now he could not. Once only had the perfect life been focused in a human body. He had not returned. Why should we? The Word now taught and healed, fought and suffered, through the yielded wills of other men.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

“...now her compassion had been pierced and set flowing; it felt as though her life's blood were running away.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill