“Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret.”
Quote by Anthony Trollope
“For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds.”
Source: George MacDonald: The Complete Fantasy Collection - 8 Novels & 30+ Short Stories and Fairy Tales (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Lilith, Phantastes, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind, Portent, The Lost Princess, Adela Cathcart, Dealings with the Fairies and many more
“Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.”
“The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”
Source: The Complete Fairy Tales
“Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.”
Source: A Gate at the Stairs
“I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!”
Source: A Gate at the Stairs
“It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice.”
Source: Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III
“If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.”
Source: Vanishing Acts
“We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments.... Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.”
Source: Creation in Christ: Unspoken Sermons
“I watch her do the simplest things: brushing her hair into a ponytail, feeding the dog, tying Sophie's shoelaces, and I want to tell her what she means to me, but I never actually say the words. After all, to acknowledge Delia as a drug, I'd have to face the fact that one day I might have to go without her and this I can't do.”
Source: Vanishing Acts
“We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey.”
Source: The Complete Poetry of George MacDonald: A Book of Strife, in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul + Rampolli: Growths from a Long-planted Root + A Hidden Life Collection and Other Poems
