The Dean's Watch Quotes

“Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Believe instead in love. It is my faith that love shaped the universe as you shape your clocks, delighting in creation. I believe that just as you wish to give me your clock in love, refusing payment, so God loves me and gave Himself for me. That is my faith. I cannot presume to force it upon you, I can only ask you in friendship to consider it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Love. The only indestructible thing. The only wealth and the only reality. The only survival. At the end of it all there was nothing else.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“It was one of those early November mornings that are as beautiful as any in spring. There was gold everywhere, drifts of it on the elm tree, flakes of gold under our feet, gold dust on the hedges, liquid gold in the refracted falling light.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Winter, spring and summer did not accommodate themselves to one's mood as autumn did. They lacked its gentleness.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Whatever had made the Dean take such a fancy to him, a cowardly, selfish, obstinate, ugly old fellow like him? He would never understand it. He took the piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at that too. Faith in God. God. A word he had always refused. But the Dean had said, put the word love in its place.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“She lived too close to despair to have any strength left for self-knowledge. She might have been able to acknowledge herself unloved but to know herself unloving was beyond her strength.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“It was one of the great fen sunsets, flaming across the sky from horizon to horizon, burning up the earth beneath it to nothingness. But it could not subdue the Cathedral. Isaac was looking straight up at the three great towers and the flaming clouds were streaming out from them like banners. Yet there was no wind, and no movement in the sky except just above the Rollo tower where two small white clouds were in gentle flight. They soared and sank again, infinitely graceful and lovely, the golden light touching their wings and breasts. Then they soared once more and were lost in the light. They were two white swans.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Loneliness made or ruined a man. It frightened him so that he must either sing and build in the face of the dark, like a bird or a beaver, or hide from it like a beast in his den. There were perhaps always only the two ways to go, God or the jungle.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Joy being of God was a living thing, a fountain not a cistern, one of those divine things that are possessed only as they overflow and flow away, and not easily come by because it must break into human life through the hard crust of sin and contingency. Joy came now here, now there, was held and escaped.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Could mere loving be a life's work? Could it be a career like marriage or nursing the sick or going on the stage? Could it be adventure?”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“The storm had passed and the whole fen lay bathed in spent sunlight. Every stream and stretch of water among the rushes, which had been whipped and tormented by the storm, lay quiet now, reflecting the piled masses of white and silver clouds that floated like swans on the far deep pools of the sky. Every twig was strung with sparkling crystal drops, and every drop had a rainbow caught in its heart.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“He knocked his pipe out. His paper rustled to the floor and his spectacles slid own his nose. His hands, red and shiny, lay relaxed on his knee. He abandoned himself to the quietness and the warmth of sun and fire. Autumn was a strange paradoxical time of the year. It was the season when he was happiest and yet it was the season when he was most vulnerable and most aware, and that was not always a happiness. Yet he liked autumn.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“She had humor and common sense and she soon knew what she must do. She must have done with her dream world, laugh at the ridiculous Mary who had lived in it and get to know the Mary whom she did not want to know, find out what she was like and what her prospects were. It sounded an easy program but she found it a grueling one. The phantasy world, she discovered, had tentacles like an octopus and cannot be escaped without mortal combat, and when at last her strong will had won the battle it seemed as though she were living in a vacuum, so little had the real world to offer the shy, frustrated, unattractive girl who was the Mary she must live with until she died. But free of the tentacles she was able now to sum up the situation with accuracy. She would not marry and being a gentlewoman no other career was open to her. She was not gifted in any way and she would never be strong and probably never free from pain. She was not a favorite with either of her parents, both of whom were vaguely ashamed of having produced so unattractive a child, and yet she was the one who would have to stay at home with them. The prospect was one of lifelong boredom and seemed to her as bleak as the cold winds that swept across the fens, even at times as terrible as the great Cathedral in whose shadow she must live and die. For at that time she did not love the Cathedral and in her phantasy life the city had merely been the hub from which her radiant dreams stretched out to the wide wheel of the world. What should she do? Her question was not a cry of despair but a genuine and honest with to know.

She never knew what put it into her head that she, unloved, should love. Religion for her parents, and therefore for their children, was not much more than a formality and it had not occurred to her to pray about her problem, and yet from somewhere the idea came as though in answer to her question, and sitting in Blanche's Bower with the cat she dispassionately considered it. Could mere loving be a life's work? Could it be a career like marriage or nursing the sick or going on the stage? Could it be adventure?”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Job's was a temperament that swung easily from one extreme to the other and now misery was lost in a joy that seemed lifting him off his feet. At this moment personal wretchedness seemed to him a small thing in comparison with the vast shining outer world that was always there, sustaining and holding him even when he did not remember or notice it, small even in comparison with his own world that he held within himself. The two, echoing and calling to each other, reflected some mystery that was greater than either.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Isaac's humility did not discriminate between man and man and scarcely between man and watch. In his thought men were much like their watches. The passage of time was marked as clearly upon a man's face as upon that of his watch and the marvelous mechanism of his body could be as cruelly disturbed by evil hazards. The outer case varied, gunmetal or gold, carter's corduroy or bishop's broadcloth, but the tick of the pulse was the same, the beating of life that gave such a heartbreaking illusion of eternity.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“It was then that the central figure of the gospels, a historical figure whom she deeply revered and sought to imitate, began at rare intervals to flash out at her like live lightning from their pages, frightening her, turning the grave blueprint into a dazzle of reflected fire. Gradually she learned to see that her fear was not of the lightning itself but what it showed her of the nature of love, for it dazzled behind the stark horror of Calvary. At this point, where so many vowed lovers faint and fail, Mary Montague went doggedly on over a period of years that seemed if possible longer and harder than the former period. At some point along the way, she did not know where because the change came so slowly and gradually, she realized that he had got her and got everything. His love held and illumined every human being for whom she was concerned, and whom she served with the profound compassion which was their need and right, held the Cathedral, the city, every flower and leaf and creature, giving it reality and beauty. She could not take her eyes from the incredible glory of his love. As far as it was possible for a human being in this world she had turned from herself. She could say, 'I have been turned,' and did not know how very few can speak these words with truth.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“They did not know how vivid are the memories of the old and that only the young are housebound when they can’t go out.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Isaac's face lit up. The phrase was literally true in his case, for his cheeks and the tip of his nose shone rosily and his blue eyes were suddenly as flooded with light as sapphires held to the sun. In the country of his mind the advancing shadows were halted and rolled back upon themselves like the fen mists when the wind suddenly freshened from the sea. He glowed and the Dean felt a pang of sadness. What would this man have been, what would he have done, had he not been so wrenched from the true by the sufferings of his boyhood? Yet perhaps without them he would not have been Bella's fairy man. Such twistings sometimes forced out poison but at other times honey. It depended what was at the heart of a man.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“...accustomed like the white blackbird to the loneliness of eccentricity yet never quite reconciled to it, they found in each other's oddness a most comforting compatibility.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Nothing mitigated failure except the knowledge that it did not matter.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Polly came stepping very demurely down the stairs, but the demureness emphasized the gaiety of the crimson ribbons on her bonnet and the sparkle in her eyes, and as she came the bells began to ring. Isaac opened the front door and light and air and music poured in, broke against Emma like bright water against a dark rock, flowed around her, joined behind her, and to Isaac's fancy filled the house. "Shut the door, Isaac," said Emma sharply from the pavement. Isaac did so and then leaned against it chuckling. "Too late, Emma," he said. "It's in.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Genius creates from the heart and when men put love into their work there is power in it, there is a soul in the body.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“The scent of a flower is a very close and intimate thing, she thought. It can seem to be a part of your body and blood.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“...but tonight he remembered only the warm rooms and the faces of men and women bent over their bowls of steaming soup, and the children already asleep in their beds. He felt for them all a profound love, and he glowed. The moment of his loving was in the world of time merely sixty seconds ticked out by his watch, but in another dimension it was an arc of light encircling the city and leaving not one heart within it untouched by blessedness. Then the clocks began to strike, and the light of the ugly little man's moment of self-forgetfulness was drawn back again into the deep warmth within him. And he understood nothing of what had happened to him, only that now, for a little while, for a few moments or a few days, he would be happy and feel safe.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“There were lights in the nave but they could do no more than splash pools of gold here and there, they could not illumine the shadows above or the dim unlighted chantries and half-seen tombs. The great pillars soared into darkness and the aisles narrowed to twilight. Candles twinkled in the choir and the high altar with its flowers was ablaze with them, but all the myriad flames were no more than seed pearls embroidered on a dark cloak.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“He was a convinced but hardworked rationalist, always hard at it re-convincing himself of his convictions.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“He sat for a long time and thought to himself that he wished he knew how to pray, yet he knew, untaught, how by abandonment of himself to let the quietness take hold of him.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

“Love, and nothing else, was eternal. "Love is the Lord by whom we escape death.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch