Three Cities of Bells by Goudge, Elizabeth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is three books in one, (A City of Bells, Towers in the Mist, The Dean's Watch) each book about a cathedral town in England, set in either Edwardian or Elizabethan times. As historical fiction, it is filled with satisfying details on the daily life of the diffrent characters. There is also great insight into different human natures. Although showing its age by the moral attitudes, the assumption of differences based on social class, and the pat happy endings for so many characters, this is not always an undesirable thing in books, as with imagination we enter a world that is definitely different from our own, and that has much to teach us. Elizabeth Goudge is a writer who has a great gift in human insight and in language use.
P. 109: "Felicity chattered as a bird sings, joy being with her a thing that must be instantly expressed lest she burst, but Jocelyn did not speak, it being with him a thing that silenced."
P. 186: "As in all first intercourse between shy strangers each difficult sentence that they spoke seemed a rope flung across the chasm that separated them from each other."
P. 220: "...The cheerful comfortable view of those who have suffered...only in imagination."
P. 303: "The loveliest phrases are winged, and when the poet opens the door of the place where he put them he finds that the tiresome creatures have flown away."
P. 351: "A poem can be like two hands that lift you up and put you down in a new place. You look back with astonishment and find that because you have read a few lines on a printed page, or listened for a couple of minutes to a voice speaking, you have arrived at somewhere quite different."
P. 367: "They love indeed who quake to say they love."
P. 368: "(We forget) ...at midday when the sun is shining, that (we have) come from the dark and (are) journeying towards the dark again."
P. 454: "He was afraid. It was suddenly dreadful to him that we do not know to what we travel; only that the way is like an increasingly darkening tunnel. At the heart of it the blackness is like pitch. We must pass through it, there is no escape, and there is no one to come back and tell us what it is like in that darkness, or what it is like beyond."
P. 536: "All of them...had seemed to live in a world where compassion was not necessary. He saw now that it was the very first necessity, always and everywhere, and should flow between all men, always and everywhere. Men lived with their nearest and dearest and knew little of them, and strangers passing by in the street were as impersonal as trees walking, and all the while there was this deep affinity, for all men suffered."
P. 567, about daydreaming: "A drifting mood, encouraged, is like a current at sea. You have no control over where it will take you."


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