Golden Lilies Quotes

“Friends! It is only when the cold season comes that we know the pine tree and the cypress to be evergreens, and friends are known in adversity.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“muddy water is often made clear if allowed to stand still.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“He did not want his son to be all for present success, as the American, or to be all for tradition, as is the Englishman, but he thought the two might find a happy meeting place in a mind not yet well formed.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“a heart that is busy cannot mourn,”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“The snake charmer should not touch the serpents before his child’s eyes, knowing that the child will try to imitate him in all things.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“When a man has been burned once with hot soup he forever after blows upon cold rice”; so these men of China will think long before trusting again a foreigner with their silver.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“For fifty years I plodded through the vale of lust and strife, Then through my dreams there flashed a ray of the old sweet peaceful life. No scarlet-tasseled hat of state can vie with soft repose; Grand mansions do not taste the joys that the poor man’s cabin knows. I hate the threatening clash of arms when fierce retainers throng, I loathe the drunkard’s revels and the sound of fife and song; But I love to seek a quiet nook, and some old volume bring Where I can see the wildflowers bloom and hear the birds in spring.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“Man attains not by himself, nor woman by herself, but like the one-winged birds of the ancient legend, they must rise together.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“Man does not attain the one-winged birds of our childhood’s tale, they must rise together.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“You cannot speak of the ocean to a well frog, nor sing of ice to a summer insect. She will not understand.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“as poison that reaches the blood spreads through the body, so does the love of gossip spread through the soul of woman.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“The written word for the trouble is two women beneath one rooftree, and I greatly fear that the wise man who invented writing had knowledge that cost him dear. Perhaps he, too, had a daughter-in-law.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies

“My firstborn, Michael, nearly died in his first moments of life, and he was sickly for some weeks after. I recall clearly those anxious days, peering into his incubator. I remember aching to hold him, and yet, superstitiously, I feared that if I made that connection, if I dared to love him more than I already did, he would be snatched from me.”
― Eileen Goudge, Golden Lilies