Literary Birthday – 24 April – Elizabeth Goudge

Elizabeth Goudge was born 24 April 1900, and died 1 April 1984.

Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people–those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food.
Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried … nothing is so warming and companionable.
Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance.
As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist that make an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street itself.
There he sits, your bookseller, surrounded by a thousand minds all done up neatly in cardboard cases; beautiful minds, courageous minds, strong minds, wise minds, all sorts and conditions… He deals in the stuff of eternity and there’s no death in a bookseller’s shop. Plato and Jane Austen and Keats sit side by side behind his back, Shakespeare is on his right hand and Shelley on his left.
Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other.

Elizabeth Goudge was an English author of novels, short stories, and children’s books. She won the Carnegie Medal in 1946 for The Little White Horse. She was a best-selling author in both the UK and the US from the 1930s through the 1970s. J. K. Rowling named The Little White Horse as one of her favourite books.

Source for an image of the author

by Amanda Patterson