Jennifer

“What is the scent of water?” “Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew. Mary, it is most alarming, the way you make me talk. I don’t talk to anyone else as I do to you. I’d be ashamed to.” Mary was suddenly aware of wealth and when he asked her again, “Well, are you happy?” she replied with absolute truth, “Yes, I am.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“You do the duty of the tasks at hand,” he lectured himself in a whisper, prompting the man sitting opposite to lift his eyes from the Times. “You keep faith with your responsibilities and your vocation, and you love the souls you’ve brought into the world, and the souls God brings into your life. You work and you pray. You try to turn everything into prayer, and you practice hope. You keep your eyes trained on the true horizon.” Anyway, that was his theory—one that he believed was true. The praxis was more difficult.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Sabbatical: A Novel

“And so it seems to me now right that the two people who mean most to my life, the old man who gazed entranced at the butterflies in my parents’ garden and the child Mary, should have been physically the most parted from me. With both there was only the one meeting, yet they are now more to me than even Ambrose or Jenny. I never grieved that I did not see the old man again and I will set myself to learn not to grieve because I shall not see Mary again. The broken relationship, touched by God, is whole and perfect as it could not have been if there had been the normal sequence of human misunderstandings. I am so thankful for all I have learned here, for the treasure hid in a field. It’s not the final treasure, it’s merely a shadow of coming knowledge, not knowledge itself.”
― 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“For he saw now that his true ugliness had been withdrawn by his Lord while he wept.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