Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

I don't know what my formula is. I only know I like my characters to walk in clouds. I like a little bit of the fairy tale. Let others photograph the ugliness of the world. I don't want to distress people.

The ugly can achieve an absoluteness beyond the reach of beauty.

Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

To visualize is to see what is not there, what is not real - a dream. To visualize is, in fact, to make visual lies. Visual lies, however, have a way of coming true.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

Don't we want to escape our real world and go into something larger than that, simpler than that, more beautiful or darker?

Reality and fantasy, we need both of those to survive. If we don't have fantasy, dreams and all of those things, what's the point of carrying on? And you need to watch out for reality because buses come.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

A truly beautiful person is one who is good at discovering beauty.

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

The true nature of the world was weirder than any bizarre fabric that anyone might weave from the warp and weft of imagination's loom.

Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.

We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.

Truth is beautiful within and without, forevermore.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

Beautiful thoughts build a beautiful soul. ...There's always something beautiful to be experienced wherever you are.

Creating and sharing beautiful things has provided me with the inspiration that we can do things we never thought we could do and that we will get to see wonderful things we never thought we would see.

A wonder tale can be truer than true," I said. I had learned (...) that the deepest kind of truth can be found in the strangest and wildest of stories. One may not meet a fire-breathing dragon on the way to the well. One may not encounter an army of toothed snakes in the woodshed. That does not make the wisdom in those tales any less real.

Take it, and turn to facts my fantasies.