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Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life.

Elizabeth Goudge

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Elizabeth Goudge
Age: 83 †
Born: 1900
Born: April 24
Died: 1984
Died: April 1
Author
Novelist
Writer
Wells
Somerset
Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge
Elisabeth Goudge
Time
Whatever
Compassion
Gently
Life
Lives
Civilization
Novelists
Living
Short
Contempt
Another
Tree
Touched
Nature
Respect
Gentle
Ever
Humanity
Environmental
Nothing
Animal
Treated
Men
Word
Bird

More quotes by Elizabeth Goudge

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I doubt if we nuns are really as self-sacrificing as we must seem to be to you who live in the world. We don't give everything for nothing, you know. The mystery plays fair.
Elizabeth Goudge
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All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
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What is the scent of water? Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.
Elizabeth Goudge
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To be sorry and glad together is to be perceptive to the richness of life.
Elizabeth Goudge
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One was born a certain sort of person, and though by ceasless struggle one might become as nice as that sort of person ever is, one could never become as nice as a nicer sort of person.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Marriage is a very long process.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You may think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.
Elizabeth Goudge
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The lovers of life, they are children at heart always in their wonder and delight, but they do not grab.
Elizabeth Goudge
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...The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.
Elizabeth Goudge
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If you lose your reason, you lose it into the hands of God....It's the only place where anything is safe. And when you're dead it's only what's there you'll have. Nothing else.
Elizabeth Goudge
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I have known him nearly all my life, and I am going to marry him, so that there won't ever be a time when I shan't know him.
Elizabeth Goudge
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autumn days have a holiness that spring lacks ... They are like old serene saints for whom death has lost its terror.
Elizabeth Goudge
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What is the distinguishing mark of an aristocrat?' she asked him suddenly.'Reverence,' he replied.
Elizabeth Goudge
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She long ago accepted the fact that happiness is like, swallows in spring. It may come and nest under your eaves or it may not. You cannot command it.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.
Elizabeth Goudge
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In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.
Elizabeth Goudge
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to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.
Elizabeth Goudge
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We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear, he said. Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.
Elizabeth Goudge
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There's much that goes to the makin' of a man or woman into somethin' better than a brute beast, but there's three things in chief, an' they're the places where life sets us down, an' the folks life knocks us up against, an' -- not the things ye get, but the things ye don't get.
Elizabeth Goudge