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Green Dolphin Street QUOTES

Green Dolphin Street QUOTES

21 " 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

22 " 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

23 " 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

24 " 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

25 " 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

26 " 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

27 " What a dimple! It was years since Mère Madeleine had set eyes on a child, though she had prayed for them so unceasingly. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

28 " We cannot change the sort of person that we are. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

29 " And then the captains of merchant ships can take their wives to sea with them if they wish, and in the Navy they’re not allowed to.” “I shouldn’t want to take my wife to sea with me,” said William. “A wife would be fearfully in the way.” Marianne gritted her teeth. Oh, to be a man, and not to be dependent upon the whim of a man to live! "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

30 " I think it would be advisable, Mamma,” said Marianne. “We need the exercise.” She spoke primly in her quiet, hard little voice, her clear brain leading her to make unerring attack upon the maternal sense of duty rather than the maternal affections. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

31 " If you can’t marry the man you love, then the next best thing is to marry one who is easily managed. . . . But the best thing of all, of course, is to marry a man beloved as well as manageable, as she herself intended to do. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

32 " Her strong, warm clasp did not falter, but her panic grew. An abyss seemed opening at her feet too, as for the first time in her life she realized the meaning of death. However strong religious faith may be, death remains an abyss that swallows the familiar companion of everyday as though he had never been. It is the most awful fact of human life, and at the moment Marianne knew it not only with her mind but for the first time with her panic-stricken soul as well. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

33 " Why shouldn’t it last? We are living in the age of progress, William. Mankind is progressing.” To which remark William had always replied with the irritating question, “What to? "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

34 " William eyed Tai Haruru with a certain apprehension. It struck him that in this country the men, as well as the landscape, ran to extremes. Samuel, now, was almost tedious in his insistence upon the fact of the immortal soul; Tai Haruru on the contrary seemed likely to harp unnecessarily upon its absence. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

35 " And so on that stormy autumn evening Sophie Le Patourel took the lives of William and Marianne and Marguerite and knotted them together forever. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

36 " To some people fighting in itself is enjoyable, and she supposed that the fighters of this world can always get some sort of a kick out of things. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

37 " This gathering of one’s back hair inside a large net, the new style of hairdressing that William and Tai Haruru had failed to notice on the last peaceful evening at the settlement, was excellently adapted for civil war in the primeval forest, she thought, though possibly the Parisian hairdresser who had devised the fashion had been unaware of the fact. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

38 " Marguerite was not so sure. What did human beings know about anything? Their own existence was still a mystery to them, and of the existences beyond their own they knew about as much as field mice know of the world above the heads of the bending ears of corn. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

39 " During these last twelve years, with his left hand scarcely aware of what his right was up to, he had saved many souls. And he never saw a weeping child in the street without administering lollipops, or an old woman carrying a heavy burden but he did not turn aside to carry it for her. His huge kindness grew with the years, and his wealth, by giving him the means of gratifying it, had enlarged rather than shut up his heart. Though he had continued through all these years to detest the pursuit of money, yet its possession had done much for him. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street

40 " Something very odd was happening to William. His cheeks were on fire and his eyes were like lamps. He was breathing the air of the spiritual country where he belonged, a free and rollicking country where green dolphins sported in the clear water and the great winds moved at will through the deep woods. He had breathed that air when he first came to happy Green Dolphin Street, though he had hardly known then what he did, but now, as he listened to tales of that country where a man could breathe, he knew he was at home. That country of his was not in one part of the world more than another, it was wherever there were freedom and laughter and good comradeship, wherever the doors were flung wide in welcome to whoever cared to enter, and men lay down alone, among their enemies with no weapon in their hands, and slept well. "

― Elizabeth Goudge , Green Dolphin Street