How dare men live

I am delightfully lost in the Elizabeth Goudge novel A City of Bells at the moment. So many quotes! There is one in my latest Instagram post (which you should be able to see at the bottom of this page) and there will be more to come. I meant to post this one last night as a Sunday reflection, but I seem to be out of the habit of remembering to post to the blog. But here it is. I did find this one quite sobering and challenging, from the child Henrietta:

As she got up and dusted her knees Henrietta realised how the invisible world must be saturated with the stories that men tell both in their minds and by their lives. They must be everywhere, these stories, twisting together, penetrating existence like air breathed into the lungs, and how terrible, how awful, thought Henrietta, if the air breathed should be foul. How dare men live, how dare they think or imagine, when every action and every thought is a tiny thread to mar or enrich that tremendous tapestried story that man weaves on the loom that God has set up, a loom that stretches from heaven above to hell below, and from side to side of the universe… It was all rather terrifying and Henrietta was glad to hurry home to lunch. 

~Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells