Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.

Each of us has something within us which won't be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that's all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?

No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken, Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.

All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.

In each fire there is a spirit; Each one is wrapped in what is burning him.

I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.

Sorrow eats your heart and courage.

Because i've suffered. Because many times in my life i have tried to love with all my heart, and my love has wound up being trampled or betrayed.

He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.

THIS TORTURE Why should we tell you our love stories when you spill them together like blood in the dirt? Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor, or a fire we can’t see, but how does saying that push us through the top of the head into the light above the head? Love is not an iron pot, so this boiling energy won’t help. Soul, heart, self. Beyond and within those is one saying, How long before I’m free of this torture!

Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

Now that another is suffering pain at thy hand, trust not that thy heart shall be exempt from affliction.

What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering?

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

My heart hurt so much I can't believe it. How can it keep beating, feeling like this?

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

I wish I had no heart, it aches so.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)