L.M. Montgomery

“Gilbert, I'm afraid I'm scandalously in love with you.”

“In everything you do aim to excel for what is worth doing is worth doing well”

“A favor is never so long-lived as a grudge.”

“Truth exists, only lies have to be invented.”

“Fairyland is the loveliest word because it means everything the human heart desires.”

“After all, it was nice to be loved than to be rich and admired and famous.”

“Do you know what I think Mayflowers are, Marilla? I think they must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer, and this is their heaven.”

“If only she were a boy, speeding in khaki by Carol's side to the western front! She had wished that in a burst of romance when Jem had gone, without perhaps, meaning it. She meant it now. There were moments when waiting at home, in safety and comfort, seemed an unendurable thing.”

“I could spank Constantine and skin him alive afterwards, that I could," she exclaimed bitterly. "Oh, Susan, I'm surprised at you," said the doctor, pulling a long face. "Have you no regard for the proprieties? Skin him alive by all means but omit the spanking.”

“Charlotte had never forgotten it - she was always looking for it. An old house facing seaward, ships going up and down. Spruce woods and musty hills, cold salt air from the water, rest, quiet, silence.”

“Next to a mother she wanted a quiet place where she could be alone when she wanted to be; to listen to the wind telling her strange tales, or hold the big spotted shell that murmured of the sea to her ear, or talk to the roses in the garden.”

“She looked like a head-on collision between a fashion plate and a nightmare.”

“I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.”

“I am well in body though considerably rumpled up in spirit.”

“Jane's stories are too sensible. Then Diana puts too much murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them." -Anne Shirley”

“I know that in everybody's life must come days of depression and discouragement when all things in life seem to lose savour. The sunniest day has its clouds;but one must not forget the sun is there all the time.”

“I'm afraid our old world has come to an end, Rilla. We've got to face the fact. (Walter)”

“The other day Nan said, 'Nothing can ever be quite the same for any of us again.' It made me feel rebellious. Why shouldn't things be the same again - when everything is over and Jem and Jerry are back? We'll all be happy and jolly again and these days will seem just like a bad dream.”

“How wicked I was to wish that something dramatic would happen!' she thought. 'Oh, if we could only have those dear, monotonous, pleasant days back again! I would *never* grumble about them again.”

“She wanted to be alone - to think things out - to adjust herself, if it were possible, to the new world in which she seemed to have been transplanted with a suddenness and completeness that left her half bewildered to her own identity.”

“It was less humiliating to admit crying because of your feet than because - because somebody had been amusing himself with you and your friends had forgotten you, and other people patronised you.”

“to "hike" along a deep-rutted, pebbly lane in frail, silver-hued slippers with high French heels, is not an exhilirating experience.”

“Why, for mercy's sake, did boys try to dance who didn't know the first thing about dancing; and who had feet as big as boats?”

“An hour ago on the sand-shore he has been looking at her as if she were the only being of any importance in the world. And now she was a nobody.”

“It does not do to laugh at the pangs of youth. They are very terrible because youth has not yet learned that 'this, too, will pass away.”

“Before this war is over,' [Walter] said - or something said through his lips - 'every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it - you, Mary, will feel it - feel it to your heart's core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come - and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over - years, Mary. And in those years millions of hearts will break.”

“Heretics are wicked, but they're mighty int'resting. It's jest that they've got sorter lost looking for God, being under the impression that He's hard to find - which He ain't never.”

“He makes up the most remarkable yarns - and then his mother shuts him up in the closet for telling stories. And he sits down and makes up another one, and has it ready to relate to her when she lets him out. He had one for me when he came down tonight. 'Uncle Jim,' says he, solemn as a tombstone, 'I had a 'venture in the Glen today.' 'Yes, what was it?' says I, expecting something quite startling, but no-wise prepared for what I really got. 'I met a wolf in th street,' says he, 'a 'normous wolf with a big red mouf and awful long teeth, Uncle Jim.' 'I didn't know there was any wolves at the Glen,' says I. 'Oh, he comed there from far, far away,' says Joe, 'and I fought he was going to eat me up, Uncle Jim.' 'Were you scared?' says I. 'No, 'cause I had a gun,' says Joe, 'and I shot the wolf dead, Uncle Jim - solid dead - and then he went up to heaven and bit God,' says he.”

“We came to the comforting conclusion that the Creator probably knew how to run His universe quite as well as we do, and that, after all, there are no such things as 'wasted' lives, saving and except when am individual wilfully squanders and wastes his own life...”

“you'll find that trickery of the mind is just as potent as trickery of deed”

“Having adventures comes natural to some people", said Anne serenely. "You just have a gift for them or you haven't.”

“Babies are such fascinating creatures," said Anne dreamily. "They are what I heard somebody at Redmond call 'terrific bundles of potentialities.' Think of it, Katherine . . . Homer must have been a baby once . . . a baby with dimples and great eyes full of light . . . he couldn't have been blind then, of course.”

“Life is only beginning for you now . . . since at last you're quite free and independent. And you never know what may be around the next bend in the road”

“Nobody is ever too old to dream. And dreams never grow old.”

“P.S.2. I have put in a new pen. And I love you because you aren't pompous like Dr. Carter . . . and I love you because you haven't got sticky-out ears like Johnny. And . . . the very best reason of all . . . I love you for just being Gilbert!”

“Do you know, Gilbert, there are times when I strongly suspect that I love you!”

“I've always loved the night and I'll like lying awake and thinking over everything in life, past, present and to come. Especially to come.”

“In daylight I belong to the world . . . in the night to sleep and eternity. But in the dusk I'm free from both and belong only to myself . . . and you”

“Only a few more weeks till spring . . . and a few more weeks then till summer . . . and holidays . . . and Green Gables . . . and golden sunlight on Avonlea meadows . . . and a gulf that will be silver at dawn and sapphire at noon and crimson at sunset . . . and you.”

“What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.”

“There was no mistaking her sincerity--it breathed in every tone of her voice. Both Marilla and Mrs. Lynde recognized its unmistakable ring. But the former understood in dismay that Anne was actually enjoying her valley of humiliation--was reveling in the thoroughness of her abasement. Where was the wholesome punishment upon which she, Marilla, had plumed herself? Anne had turned it into a species of positive pleasure.”

“There is another bend in the road after this. No one knows what will happen.”

“The beauty of winter is that it makes you appreciate spring.”

“...a little "appreciation" sometimes does quite as much good as all the conscientious "bringing up" in the world.”

“Do you think amethysts can be the souls of good violets?”

“I wouldn't want to marry anybody who was wicked, but I think I'd like it if he could be wicked and wouldn't.”

“The things you wanted so much when you were a child don't seem half so wonderful to you when you get them”

“They captured in their ramble all the mysteries and magics of a March evening. Very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great, white, brooding silence -- a silence which was yet threaded through with many little silvery sounds which you could hear if you hearkened as much with your soul as your ears. The girls wandered down a long pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into the heart of a deep-red, overflowing winter sunset.”

“March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.”

“He had also the reputation of being a bit of a lady killer. But that probably accrued to him from his possession of a laughing, velvety voice which no girl could hear without a heartbeat, and a dangerous way of listening as if she were saying something that he had longed all his life to hear.”