Green Dolphin Street Quotes

“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, Green Dolphin Street

“[I]f you believe in God omnipresent, then you must believe everything that comes into your life, person or event, must have something of God in it to be experienced and loved; not hated.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“The whole universe was stilled as if listening for a voice. For the space of one heartbeat there was peace on earth. For one fraction of a moment there was no deed of violence wrought on earth, no hatred, no fire, no whirlwind, no pain, no fear. Existence rested against the heart of God, then sighed and journeyed again.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Someone once said to me,said Marguerite, that our home, our special country, is where we find liberation. I suppose she meant that it is where our souls find it easiest to escape from self, and it seem to me that it is that way with us when what is about us echoes the best that we are.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Fairyland...Paradise...In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“What is the distinguishing mark of an aristocrat?' she asked him suddenly.
'Reverence,' he replied.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Civilization... is another word for respect for life. One can't have too much respect for a loveliness that's brittle as spun glass.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Only at the very center of pain or joy was one wholly wretched, wholly joyful. There was only one hour of the night in which sunset or dawn was not present to the mind in memory or hope, only one hour of the day when the sun seemed neither rising nor declining, and the intensity of those hours dulled and blinded.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“but she knew also that what the world sees of the life of any human creature is not the real life; that life is lived in secret, a reality that moves behind the facade of appearance, like wind behind a painted curtain; only an occasional ripple of the surface, a smile, a sudden light or shadow passing on a face, surprising by its unexpectedness, gives news of something quite other than what is seen.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Just as it takes death to awaken us to the full stature of someone loved,”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“I am nothing--nothing--nothing. She was clinging to that, she found, as to a sort of anchor, because it kept her from having to face the terrible possibility that God Himself was not, and the realization of God's nothingness would be the final horror that could not be borne. Yet as time passed she knew that that possibility, too, must be faced. She must let go of the very last thing left her, the knowledge of her own nothingness, and face it. And she let go, and looked around for God and did not find Him; and then there was nothing, except the dark night.
But there was the dark night. Very slowly she became conscious of it, and then she found that she was hugging it to her, wrapping herself in it as though it were a cloak to hide her in this hour of her humiliation. For a long while the night was all that she had, and then suddenly, like a sword stabbing the darkness, came a trill of music. It was a bird welcoming the dawn. That, too, was added. She drew back one of the curtains of her bed and saw a patch of grey light where the window was. That also. During the hours of the night she had been completely stripped, and now one by one a few things were being handed to her for the clothing of her naked, shivering, humiliated soul. For a few things one must have to make one decent if one was to step forth again upon the highway. For that, obviously, impossible though the task seemed to her at this moment, was what she had to do as soon as the full day came, because there wasn't anything else that she could do. She had to go on living and serving, with the living and serving stripped of all pleasure...But there would be something. There would be darkness and light, night and day, both sweet things, and music linking them together. The full glory of the dawn chorus seemed all about her...it was full day by the time she pulled back the muslin curtains that covered her window and flung it wide and leaned out, the scent of the spring earth rushing up to meet her. That also was given back...By whom?”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“She would not rest until existence was for her a sucked orange. When there was no drop of juice left, then she would fling away the rind and die content.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Hard labor and the passing of the years had contorted and hardened his limbs to queer, crooked shapes, but he gave no impression of deformity, as Nat did. So of the earth was he that he looked more like a tree than a man, one of those tough old pine trees that nothing in the way of weather except a thunderbolt will ever get the better of.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Someone once said to me,” said Marguerite, “that our home, our special country, is where we find liberation. I suppose she meant that it is where our souls find it easiest to escape from self, and it seems to me it is that way with us when what is about us echoes the best that we are. You feel at home in places that are kind and with people who are good fun because you’re kind and amusing yourself.”

“What’s your home like, Marguerite?” asked William.

“I can’t describe it exactly,” said Marguerite. “But when I am living in a particular sort of way I say to myself that now I am in my own country. It is when I am living very simply, and rather hardly, and the light is clear and the wind cold and there aren’t any lies or subterfuges. When I am there I have a feeling that a door opens out of it into yet another country where my soul has always lived, and that one day I shall find out how to unlock the door.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“The end was present in the beginning and the beginning in the end, so that there was neither beginning nor end but only the perfection of the whole. Life had come round full circle, and the aging man that he was admitted it not with weariness but with a welling up within him of refreshment that was like the welling up of youth.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Now she watched Nat as a small child watches a teacher from whom it must at all costs learn. He took to himself each day as it came with childlike trustfulness, and so did she. He never complained, and neither did she. He took every misfortune with a grin, and so did she. He took upon himself all the hardest and most unpleasant duties as a matter of mere routine, and she tried to do the same,”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Unclean. They were to disguise themselves as outcasts, untouchables, and so get away. She knew all about these wretched outcasts. They handled the dead and were unclean. They were supposed to be possessed by devils, and anyone coming in contact with them was also bedeviled. They were not allowed to touch food and had to eat what was thrown to them from the ground like dogs. They must enter no house and speak to neither man nor woman of the clean. They were dressed in rags and daubed from head to foot with a red paint made from stinking shark oil and red ochre mixed, red being the funereal color. If they were not insane to start with, they soon became so.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“She had known then that there were things one was more afraid of being without with ease than possessing with pain.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“sudden throb of triumph in Marianne’s soul; for this, in spite of all, had been a man who had left the world the richer for his passing through it, and even if immortality were an empty dream, that were sufficient justification for the fact of life. He had lived for the poor and the outcast, he had served them up to the moment of his death, and she in whatever ways she could find would serve them too.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“it was only in his rare moments of silence, when his face fell into repose and the laughter died out of his eyes and his full lips drooped one upon the other, that one observer in a thousand might have known him for a man who dared not think. In those moments he looked like a mangy, sad old lion looking out upon the splendor of the grand old days from behind the bars of his prison cell.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“From the aloof height of Le Paradis, St. Pierre looked not quite real, crushed to nothingness by the immensity of sea and sky around it. The narrow, twisting cobbled lanes, the steep flights of steps, the old granite houses with their gables and protruding upper stories, the bow-windowed shops and the inns with their swinging signs, the tall church tower, the long sea wall guarded by the breakwaters and the grey mass of the fort, the masts of ships sheltering within the harbor, were dwarfed to the semblance of a dream town whose fragility caught at the heart.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“There was nothing in her immediate ancestry to account for her. There was no explaining her except by the theory that some fierce spark of endeavor, lit by a forgotten pioneer ancestor, had lived on in the contented stuff of succeeding generations until the wind of a new age whipped it into a flame that was called Marianne Le Patourel. . . . Or by the theory propounded by the peasant nurse of her babyhood, who had vowed she was a changeling.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“She had taken to herself her mother’s fair beauty and as much—and no more—of her father’s intelligence as it was desirable that a pretty child should have, and to them some good fairy had added something else, the best of all gifts, the power of enjoyment, not just animal enjoyment of good health and good spirits but that authentic love of life that sees good days.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“She had that transparent honesty and purity and serenity that like clear water flooding over the bed of a stream washes away uncleanness, and makes fresh and divinely lovely all that is seen through its own transparency. We see the world through the medium of our own characters, and Marguerite saw and loved all things through her own bright clarity, and enjoyed them enormously.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“She assured herself that the practice of the presence of God, that she had learned with self-discipline of thought and will, was not a selfish thing but something absolutely essential if one’s soul was to be of the slightest use.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“Our home, our special country, is for all of us the place where we find liberation; a very difficult word. . . .that tries to describe something that can’t be described but is the only thing worth having.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“. . .a peal of laughter sounded from within the room where the firelight was. . . .it was a boy’s laughter, and the joy of it called to the unhappy Marianne as nothing in her life had ever called to her before.

He was standing on the hearthrug as a lord of creation should, his legs straddling arrogantly, his arms above his head as he stretched himself, his laughter caught up upon a prodigious yawn. He was broad-shouldered, strong, yet possessed of an elegance that was strangely mature, taller than she was but much younger. . .the brilliance of it was entangled in the wildly untidy shock of red-gold curly hair and there seemed sparks in his tawny eyes. His face was round and ruddy, with freckles on the nose, but finely featured. He had full red lips and a deep cleft in his chin, and he showed a great deal of pink tongue as he yawned. His coat and waistcoat of vivid emerald green cloth were stained with seawater and torn linings protruded from the pockets. His white cravat was soiled, the straps that should have fastened his long peg-top trousers beneath his instep had snapped, so that they coiled round his legs like delirious green snakes, and his shoes needed a polish. Never was a male so much in need of female attention or so blissfully unaware of his need. . . .she stood with her back against the door, stiff and ungainly, staring at him with great dark eyes that seemed to devour his face with the intensity of her gaze, and she could not move or speak because her heart was beating so madly that it made her feel sick and faint. Her figure might have delayed to plump itself out into the womanly roundness proper to her age, but her heart did not delay to claim this male creature for her own. She was in love, in love at sixteen, desperately in love, as Juliet was, and with a boy who for all his height and strength and maturity was only a child of thirteen years. It was absurd. But then Marianne was never at any time in the least like other girls.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“We cannot change the sort of person that we are.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“What an idiot she had been to try and make Le Paradis wholly her own. It was of the essence of home that it should hold out its arms to diverse personalities and gather them together into a harmonious whole. A house stamped with one personality only was surely more like the cell of a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement than a home.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street