L.M. Montgomery

“At that moment Marilla had a revelation. In the sudden stab of fear that pierced her very heart she realized what Anne had come to mean to her. She would have admitted that she liked Anne--nay, that she was very fond of Anne. But now she knew as she hurried wildly down the slope that Anne was dearer to her than anything else on earth”

“It's fun to be almost grown up in some ways, but it's not the kind of fun I expected, Marilla. There's so much to learn and do and think that there isn't time for big words.”

“Oh, it makes SUCH a difference. It LOOKS so much nicer. When you hear a name pronounced can't you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out? I can; and A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished. If you'll only call me Anne spelled with an E I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia.”

“She could keep her silence, it was evident, as energetically as she could talk.”

“No sabes reconocer el amor. Has imaginado el amor como una sensación determinada y quieres que en la vida real sea así.”

“You don't know love when you see it. You've tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that.”

“But the summer had been a very happy one, too -- a time of glad living with summer suns and skies, a time of keen delight in wholesome things; a time of renewing and deepening of old friendships; a time in which she had learned to live more nobly, to work more patiently, to play more heartily.”

“Beauty was all around them. Unsuspected tintings glimmered in the dark demesnes of the woods and glowed in their alluring by-ways. The spring sunshine sifted through the young green leaves. Gay trills of song were everywhere. There were little hollows where you felt as if you were bathing in a pool of liquid gold. At every turn some fresh spring scent struck their faces: Spice ferns...fir balsam...the wholesome odour of newly ploughed fields. There was a lane curtained with wild-cherry blossoms; a grassy old field full of tiny spruce trees just starting in life and looking like elvish things that had sat down among the grasses; brooks not yet "too broad for leaping"; starflowers under the firs; sheets of curly young ferns; and a birch tree whence someone had torn away the white-skin wrapper in several places, exposing the tints of the bark below-tints ranging from purest creamy white, through exquisite golden tones, growing deeper and deeper until the inmost layer revealed the deepest, richest brown as if to tell tha all birches, so maiden-like and cool exteriorly, had yet warm-hued feelings; "the primeval fire of earth at their hearts.”

“Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the poplars sounded like some sad, weird old rune-some broken dream of old memories. A slender, shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness.”

“The wind was off shore, and only broke the sea's surface in to long, silvery ripples, and sent sheeny shadows flying out across it, from every point and headland, like transparent wings. The dusk was hanging a curtain of violet gloom over the sand-dunes and the headlands where gulls were huddling. The sky was faintly filmed over with scarfs of silken vapor. Cloud fleets rode at anchor along the horizons. An evening star was watching over the bar.”

“On one side, across the channel, stretched the silvery sand shore of the bar; on the other extended a long, curving beach of red cliffs, rising steeply from the pebbled coves. It was a shore that knew the magic and mystery of storm and star. There is a great solitude about such a shore. The woods are never solitary-they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery-We may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only-a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is in the company of the archangels.”

“The day had begun sombrely in grey cloud and mist, but had ended in a pomp of scarlet and gold. Over the western hills beyond the harbour were amber deeps and crystalline shadows, with the fire of sunset below. The north was a mackerel sky of little, fiery golden clouds. The red light flamed on the white sails of a vessel gliding down the channel, bound to a Southern port in a land of palms. Beyond her, it smote upon and incarnadined the shining, white, grassless faces of the sand-dunes.”

“It was a gracious evening, full of delectable lights and shadows. In the west was a sky of mackerel clouds-crimson and amber-tinted, with long strips of apple-green sky between. Beyond was the glimmering radiance of a sunset sea, and the ceaseless voice of many waters came up from the tawny shore.”

“Let's sum up... a little house, white and green or to be made so... with trees, preferably birch and spruce... a window looking seaward... on a hill. That sounds very possible... but there is one other requirement. There must be magic about it, Jane... lashings of magic... and magic houses are scarce, even on the Island. Have you any idea at all what I mean, Jane?"Jane reflected."You want to feel that the house is yours before you buy it," she said."Jane," said dad, "you are too good to be true.”

“Човек свиква на всичко, дори и с обесване, както казват ирландците.”

“He smiled his shy smile at her as he went into the yard. Anne took the memory of it with her when she went to her room that night and sat for a long while at her open window, thinking of the past and dreaming of the future. Outside the Snow Queen was mistily white in the moonshine; the frogs were singing in the marsh beyond Orchard Slope. Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.”

“Welcome, Anne. I thought you'd come today. You belong to the afternoon so it brought you. Things that belong together are sure to come together. What a lot of trouble that would save some people if they only knew it. But they don't...and so they waste beautiful energy moving heaven and earth to bring things together that don't belong.”

“It was a lovely afternoon - such an afternoon as only September can produce when summer has stolen back for one more day of dream and glamour.”

“Her beauty is the least of her dower-and she is the most beautiful woman I've ever known. That laugh of hers! I've angled all summer to evoke that laugh, just for the delight of hearing it.”

“Gilbert, I'm afraid I'm scandalously in love with you. You don't think it's irreverent, do you? But then, you're not a minister.”

“‎"Wouldn't it be lovely, Miss Shirley, if some one could just wave a wand and make everybody beautiful?" she said wistfully. "Just fancy my feelings, Miss Shirley, if I suddenly fould myself beautiful! But then"....with a sigh..."if we were all beauties who would do the work?" Anne of Windy Poplars”

“And then - thwack! - Anne had brought her slate down on Gilbert's head and cracked it - slate not head - clear across.”

“Velvet carpet," sighed Anne luxuriously, "and silk curtains! I've dreamed of such things, Diana. But do you know I don't believe I feel very comfortable with them after all. There are so many things in this room and all so splendid that there is no scope for imagination. That is one consolation when you are poor--there are so many more things you can imagine about.”

“Well, that was life. Gladness and pain... hope and fear... and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart... learn to love it and then let it go in turn.”

“You've been four of the dearest, sweetest, goodest girls who ever went together through college,' averred Aunt Jamesina, who never spoiled a compliment by misplaced economy.”

“I told you the Bible was more to be depended on than newspapers!”

“ANNE: You said you'd keep me in my room until I confessed. I just thought up a good confession and made it as interesting as I could.MARILLA: But it was still a lie.ANNE: You wouldn't believe the truth.”

“I like to hear a storm at night. It is so cosy to snuggle down among the blankets and feel that it can't get at you.”

“It must be lovely to be grown up, Marilla, when just being treated as if you were is so nice...Well, anyway, when I grow up, I'm always going to talk to little girls as if they were, too, and I'll never laugh when they use big words.”

“But pearls are for tears, the old legend says," Gilbert had objected."I'm not afraid of that. And tears can be happy as well as sad. My very happiest moments have been when I had tears in my eyes—when Marilla told me I might stay at Green Gables—when Matthew gave me the first pretty dress I ever had—when I heard that you were going to recover from the fever. So give me pearls for our troth ring, Gilbert, and I'll willingly accept the sorrow of life with its joy." -Anne”

“It is not," Valency could hear her mother's prim, dictatorial voice asserting, "it is not MAIDENLY to think about MEN.”

“She makes me love her and I like people who make me love them. It saves me so much trouble making myself love them”

“Nathan always believed his wife was trying to poison him but he didn't seem to mind. He said it made life kind of exciting.”

“That's one of the things we learn as we grow older -- how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty.”

“At life's banquet of success I may not be the guest of honor, but I'll be among those present.”

“Well, one must be a slave to something in this kind of a world,' he said.”

“She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed away forever. Where was it now--the glory and the dream?”

“The only thing she really enjoyed was a funeral. You knew where you were with a corpse. Nothing more could happen to it. But while there was life there was fear.”

“[she] had a great reputation for unselfishness because she was always giving up a lot of things she didn't want.”

“What a spineless thing I must be not to have even one enemy!”

“I have really done so few bad things that they have to keep harping on the old ones.”

“The greatest happiness [...] is to sneeze when you want to.”

“If you buy your experience it's your own. So it's no matter how much you pay for it.”

“That's all the freedom we can hope for - the freedom to choose our prison.”

“Flowers spring to blossom where she walksThe careful ways of duty,Our hard, stiff lines of life with herAre flowing curves of beauty.-WHITTIER”

“Ah, well, let's not borrow trouble; the rate of interest is too high.”

“Let me remind you that the measure of anyone's freedom is what he can do without.”

“Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it... yet.”

“[speaking of a friend named Lavendar Lewis] 'I think her parents gave her the only right and fitting name that could possibly be given her,' said Anne. 'If they had been so blind as to name her Elizabeth or Nellie or Muriel she must have been called Lavendar just the same, I think. It's so suggestive of sweetness and old-fashioned graces and "silk attire." Now, my name just smacks of bread and butter, patchwork and chores.' 'Oh, I don't think so,' said Diana. 'Anne seems to me real stately and like a queen. But I'd like Kerenhappuch if it happened to be your name. I think people make their names nice or ugly just by what they are themselves. I can't bear Josie or Gertie for names now but before I knew the Pye girls I thought them real pretty.' 'That's a lovely idea, Diana,' said Anne enthusiastically. 'Living so that you beautify your name, even if it wasn't beautiful to begin with...making it stand in people's thoughts for something so lovely and pleasant that they never think of it by itself. Thank you, Diana.”

“There is nothing more aggravating than a man who won't talk back - unless it is a woman who won't.”