Elizabeth Goudge - The Scent of Water (1963)

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If one's intellectual equipment was not great, one's spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one's very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.

Elizabeth Goudge
What is the scent of water?" "Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.

Elizabeth Goudge
She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.

Elizabeth Goudge
Because of course she had known she must go. She always did the thing because in obedience lay the integrity that God asked of her. If anyone had asked her what she meant by integrity she would not have been able to tell them but she had seen it once like a picture in her mind, a root going down into the earth and drinking deeply there. No one was really alive without that root.

Elizabeth Goudge
Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.

Elizabeth Goudge
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
Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own.... I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.

Elizabeth Goudge
Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.

Elizabeth Goudge