The Holy Eucharist is the perfect expression of the love of Jesus Christ for man.
attr. St. Maria Goretti
It’s just not realistically possible that she said this. She was martyred at the age of 12, and this is not the phrasing of a twelve-year-old non-theologian. Nevertheless, I went looking for a source, and of course there isn’t a good one. The earliest attribution I found was from Quotable Saints, by Ronda Chervin. She gives a much longer form of the saying:
He loves, He hopes, He waits. If He came down on our altars on certain days only, some sinner, on being moved to repentance, might have to look for Him, and not finding Him have to wait. Our Lord prefers to wait Himself for years rather than keep him waiting an instant.
The Holy Eucharist is the perfect expression of the love of Jesus Christ for man, since it is the quintessence of all the mysteries of His life.
I can no longer live without Jesus. How soon shall I receive Him again?
It is, I guess, not impossible that she said the last sentence, but the rest? It strains credibility beyond any reasonable limit to think that she was responsible for it. But if she didn’t say it, who did?
The saying is very widely attributed to St. Peter Julian Eymard, and that’s much more credible on the face of it. The saint was a great promoter of Eucharistic devotion. I therefore went forth in search of a source.
St. Peter Julian’s works are available on the Internet here. Alas, they are complete only in French, but I carried on as best as I could. The word “quintessence” looked like a good search term, and it did crop up in his works, but none of them appeared to be this statement. (I don’t know French, but I know Latin and a little Spanish, and I’m confident that I’d have recognized it if it were there.)
Searching for any of the rest of it involves terms that are so common in the saint’s writings that it would take hours to survey them all.
Summary: I am convinced that this is not from St. Maria Goretti, and I would be surprised to learn that it’s not St. Peter Julian Eymard, but I can’t find it.
They didn't say it 