Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.

— Caryll Houselander

Christ must be born from every soul, formed in every life. If we had a picture of Our Lady's personality we might be dazzled into thinking that only one sort of person could form Christ in himself, and we should miss the meaning of our own being. Nothing but things essential for us are revealed to us about the Mother of God: the fact that she was wed to the Holy Spirit and bore Christ into the world. Our crowning joy is that she did this as a lay person and through the ordinary daily life that we all live; through natural love made supernatural, as the water at Can was, at her request, turned into wine.

— Caryll Houselander

God abides in men""God abides in men, These are men who are simple, they are fields of corn... Such men have mindslike wide gray skies, they have the grandeur that the fools call emptiness. God abides in men. Some men are not simple, they live in cities among the teeming buildings, wrestling with forces as strong as the sun and the rain. Often they must forgo dream upon dream... Christ walks in the wilderness in such lives. God abides in men, because Christ has put on the nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape. He has put on everyone's life...to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes, to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment... Christ has put on Man's nature, and given him back his humanness... God abides in man.

— Caryll Houselander

In many people Christ lives the life of the Host. Our life is a sacramental life. This Host life is like the Advent life, like the life of the Child in the womb, the Child in the swaddling bands, the Christ in the tomb. It is a life of dependence upon creatures, of silence and secrecy, of hidden light. It is the life of a prisoner.

— Caryll Houselander

In the world as it is, torn with agonies and dissensions, we need some direction for our souls which is never away from us; which, without enslaving us or narrowing our vision, enters into every detail of our life. Everyone longs for some such inward rule, a universal rule as big as the immeasurable law of love, yet as little as the narrowness of our daily routine. It must be so truly part of us all that it makes us all one, and yet to each one the secret of his own life with God. To this need, the imitation of Our Lady is the answer; in contemplating her we find intimacy with God, the law which is the lovely yoke of the one irresistible love.

— Caryll Houselander

I wanted to shut my mind, that my thoughts might close on my own peace, I wanted to close the peace of my love in my heartlike dew in a dark rose." From "Philip Speaks

— Caryll Houselander

Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.

— Caryll Houselander

Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.

— Caryll Houselander

Sour Marie Emilie"Sour Marie Amelia little and very old:her eyes are onyx, and her cheeks' vermilion, her apron wide and kind and cobalt blue. She comforts generations and generations of children, who are "new"at the convent school. When they are eight, they are already up to her shoulder, they grow up and go into the world, she remains, forever,always incredibly old, but incredibly never older... She has an affinity with the hens, When a hen dies, she sits down on a bench and cries, she is the only grown-up, whose tears are not frightening tears. Children can weep without shame, at her side... Soeur Marie Emilie...her apron as wide and kinds skies on a summer Dayan as clean and blue.

— Caryll Houselander

The Child Christ lives on from generation to generation in the poets, very often the frailest of men but men whose frailty is redeemed by a child's unworldliness, by a child's delight in loveliness, by the spirit of wonder. Christ was a poet, and all through His life the Child remains perfect in Him. It was the poet, the unworldly poet, who was King of the invisible kingdom; the priests and rulers could not understand that. The poets understand it, and they, too, are kings of the invisible kingdom, vassal kings of the Lord of Love, and their crowns are crowns of thorns indeed.

— Caryll Houselander