Rocking Horse Catholic Quotes

“took my parents for granted, and my nurse was simply warmth, sugar biscuits, hot milk and safety to me. Connie was the first human being outside myself to whom my heart flew out. She was about my own size and wore a blue cashmere frock which, as was usual for baby girls in those days, came down to her feet. Her hair, which was yellow and like the down on a chicken, was cut short like a boy’s, and she had white button boots on her tiny feet. We were both supplied by nurse’s sister with a tin mug and a spoon, and I, copying Connie, walked round and round and round under the big kitchen table, rattling the spoon in the mug. It is difficult to describe the joy of that occasion. From where we stumped round under the table I could see the feet of Rose Francis and her sister pushed into cosy bedroom slippers and stretched out in front of a glowing fire in the kitchen range: I could see the bottom of their big white aprons, and their balls of wool (for they were evidently knitting) rolling down onto the floor from their laps from time to time, to be chased by a kitten who was playing in the hearth. But the superb thing was Connie herself, her fluff of canary hair, her sky-blue dress, her white boots, her odd staggering yet rhythmic gait, and the sound of the spoon rattling in her tin cup. I think that was the one and only time that I ever saw Connie, but I have never forgotten her, and the odd piercing joy of my first conscious awareness of what was, to me at all events, the sheer loveliness of another human being.”
― Caryll Houselander, A Rocking Horse Catholic

“By surrender to God I mean giving oneself up to God, to be transformed in Him. It is the cure for self that is the core of the whole thing; we require to be cured of self by being changed, as the bread and wine on the altar are changed, into Christ. In this surrender is, I believe, the cure for the torment of self, which is precisely what most psychological suffering is. It is the cure for the weakness that cannot carry the common burden of the world’s sin; the cure for the fear that causes the will to wither before the challenge of life, the cure for the feebleness that makes the impact of natural beauty painful, the cure for the cowardice that causes the heart to contract and shrink before the challenge of love.”
― Caryll Houselander, A Rocking Horse Catholic