The Scent of Water Quotes

“What is the scent of water?"
"Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "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, The Scent of Water

“...your God is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, 'Lord, have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.' Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these, you will do well.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“It got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They couldn't do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“...this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can’t, and you hate yourself because you can’t, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God’s help you can command your will when you can’t command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn’t appear to agree with us.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“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, The Scent of Water

“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, The Scent of Water

“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, The Scent of Water

“Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“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, The Scent of Water

“Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can't, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God's help you can command your will when you can't command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn't appear to agree with us.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“Nothing is ever over,” said Jean. “You thread things on your life and think you’ve finished with them, but you haven’t because it’s like beads on a string and they come round again....”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, ‘Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.’ Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these you will do well.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer's mind below the surface? They'd think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see the witches' cauldron of images and memories boiling up from the subconscious, impressions whirling in from without, ideas and insights bursting up like bubbles and gone again before they can be seized. And the hopelessness of the business, the whole infuriating, exhausting, fascinating business of grabbing something out of the turmoil and imposing upon it some faint shadow or rumor of the order, pattern and rhythm of the world.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“The other two with their happy, objective minds would always be absorbed in the moment but she would look backward and remember, and look forward and be afraid, and the present would always confuse her because she would never entirely live in it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“I will,” that is my song. I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can’t, and you hate yourself because you can’t, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God’s help you can command your will when you can’t command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn’t appear to agree with us.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“Though I am able to do nothing else in this life, except only seek, my life seeming to others a vie manquee, yet it will not be so, because what I seek is the goodness of God that waters the dry places. And water overflows from one dry patch to another, and so you cannot be selfish in digging for it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“For he saw now that his true ugliness had been withdrawn by his Lord while he wept. His misshapen body remained but men would not again shrink from him. What they had shrunk from had been his own sin of self-hatred, that had made him like a beaten cur in their presence. Why should he hate himself, since God had loved him enough to die for him? He would go back into the world, and smile at all the folk in it, and love them with the same love, and they would no longer shrink from him. When their bodies were sick they would even put themselves gladly into his hands, as the creatures did. He held out his hands and looked at them, remembering how they had treated his Lord.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“She did not suppose for a moment that anything worth having, and she now knew faith to be supremely worth having, was ever easy to have.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“I was wretched, for the aftermath of this last bad time has been horrible. I have been despairing, not because of my illness, because I have found meaning and purpose in that, but because of the burden I am to other people and because I was convinced that everyone must be shrinking from me. And so, hating myself, I shrank from them and that created a new sort of loneliness. I was alone with self-hatred and that is utterly vile.

But that was when I first came, I feel different now because of a book I read.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“Unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“A man is not a different person just because he becomes aware. Oh I know it must seem like metamorphosis when the eyes of a blind man are opened, but he's the same man. We grow, mercifully, and growth is just awareness of more and more.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“The tragic capacity of the human race for going off course was a little balanced by the integrity of the animals who were always obedient to the law of their being. We were meant to love like that, thought Mary, simply because that's our law and we were told to obey it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“I deceived you and deception is stealing because it takes away the truth. Forgive me, Edith.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“People talk a lot of ballyhoo about suffering improving you. I should say that what it does is to underline what you were before.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water