Anne of Green Gables: Complete Collection (Anne of Green Gables, #1-8)

by L.M. Montgomery

"You'll probably have a good many more and worse disappointments than that before you get through life," said Marilla, who honestly thought she was making a comforting speech. "It seems to me, Anne, that you are never going to outgrow your fashion of setting your heart so on things and then crashing down into despair because you don't get them." "I know I'm too much inclined that, way" agreed Anne ruefully. "When I think something nice is going to happen I seem to fly right up on the wings of anticipation; and then the first thing I realize I drop down to earth with a thud. But really, Marilla, the flying part IS glorious as long as it lasts … it's like soaring through a sunset. I think it almost pays for the thud."

"I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string."

"How pretty and how young! It's so delightful to be seventeen, isn't it? I do envy you," concluded Miss Lavendar candidly. "But you are only seventeen at heart," smiled Anne. "No, I'm old … or rather middle-aged, which is far worse," sighed Miss Lavendar. "Sometimes I can pretend I'm not, but at other times I realize it. And I can't reconcile myself to it as most women seem to. I'm just as rebellious as I was when I discovered my first gray hair. Now, Anne, don't look as if you were trying to understand. Seventeen CAN'T understand. I'm going to pretend right away that I am seventeen too, and I can do it, now that you're here. You always bring youth in your hand like a gift. We're going to have a jolly evening. Tea first … what do you want for tea? We'll have whatever you like. Do think of something nice and indigestible."

Dreams and make-believes are all very well in the daytime and the sunshine, but when dark and storm come they fail to satisfy. One wants real things then. But you don't know this … seventeen never knows it. At seventeen dreams DO satisfy because you think the realities are waiting for you further on.

"Old maids are BORN … they don't BECOME." "Some are born old maids, some achieve old maidenhood, and some have old maidenhood thrust upon them," parodied Miss Lavendar whimsically.

"I always like to do things as well as possible," said Miss Lavendar meditatively, "and since an old maid I had to be I was determined to be a very nice one. People say I'm odd; but it's just because I follow my own way of being an old maid and refuse to copy the traditional pattern.

For two years she had worked earnestly and faithfully, making many mistakes and learning from them. She had had her reward. She had taught her scholars something, but she felt that they had taught her much more … lessons of tenderness, self-control, innocent wisdom, lore of childish hearts. Perhaps she had not succeeded in "inspiring" any wonderful ambitions in her pupils, but she had taught them, more by her own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness and vulgarity. They were, perhaps, all unconscious of having learned such lessons; but they would remember and practice them long after they had forgotten the capital of Afghanistan and the dates of the Wars of the Roses.

It is never pleasant to have our old shrines desecrated, even when we have outgrown them.

"We mustn't let next week rob us of this week's joy.

couldn't love anybody. It isn't in me. Besides I wouldn't want to. Being in love makes you a perfect slave, Ithink. And it would give a man such power to hurt you. I'd be afraid.

Some day I'm going to write a treatise on 'The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm.' It will be a harrowing bit of realism. It seems to be the prevailing impression that we live in clover, and have nothing to do but draw our quarter's salary. My treatise shall tell the truth about us. Why, if a week should pass without some one telling me that I am doing easy work for big pay I would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe 'immediately and to onct.' 'Well, you get your money easy,' some rate-payer will tell me, condescendingly. 'All you have to do is to sit there and hear lessons.' I used to argue the matter at first, but I'm wiser now. Facts are stubborn things, but as some one has wisely said, not half so stubborn as fallacies. So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence. Why, I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of everything, from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study of the solar system.

"Only old people should have rheumatism, Aunty." "Anybody is liable to rheumatism in her legs, Anne. It's only old people who should have rheumatism in their souls, though. Thank goodness, I never have. When you get rheumatism in your soul you might as well go and pick out your coffin."

'Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them.'

"Oh," laughed Anne, "I am going to be an old maid. I really can't find any one to suit me."

Have you ever noticed how many different silences there are, Gilbert? The silence of the woods … of the shore … of the meadows … of the night … of the summer afternoon. All different because all the undertones that thread them are different.

Wouldn't it be a rather drab world if everybody was wise and sensible … and good? What would we find to talk about?

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

Why, whenever you come into a room, Miss Shirley, the people in it feel happier." "That's the very nicest compliment I've ever had paid me, Pauline."

"Anne Shirley, do you think a cup of tea is a panacea for everything?

But nothing worth while is ever easy come by and I have always felt that her friendship would be worth while.

Let's be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let's dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins!

Talk about the charm of the uncaught! It's nothing to the charm of the uncatchable.

Human nature is not obliged to be consistent.

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 spellbound, 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 of the company of the archangels.

"Do you know, Captain Jim, I never like walking with a lantern. I have always the strangest feeling that just outside the circle of light, just over its edge in the darkness, I am surrounded by a ring of furtive, sinister things, watching me from the shadows with hostile eyes. I've had that feeling from childhood. What is the reason? I never feel like that when I'm really in the darkness—when it is close all around me—I'm not the least frightened." "I've something of that feeling myself," admitted Captain Jim. "I reckon when the darkness is close to us it is a friend. But when we sorter push it away from us—divorce ourselves from it, so to speak, with lantern light—it becomes an enemy.

Her heart sang all the way because she was going home to a joyous house … a house where every one who crossed its threshold knew it was a home … a house that was filled all the time with laughter and silver mugs and snapshots and babies … precious things with curls and chubby knees … and rooms that would welcome her … where the chairs waited patiently and the dresses in her closet were expecting her … where little anniversaries were always being celebrated and little secrets were always being whispered. "It's lovely to feel you like going home,"

"Gilbert dear, it's been lovely to be Anne of Green Gables again for a week, but it's a hundred times lovelier to come back and be Anne of Ingleside."

"that while we should not forget the Higher Things of Life good food is a pleasant thing in moderation."

"It isn't dark … it's twilight … there has been a love-match between light and dark and beautiful exceedingly is the offspring thereof,"

"Life is something more than 'delicately balanced organic chemistry,'" she thought happily.

When you are a little older you will be better able to 'tell the gold from the tinsel.'"

"My foolish dear … my dear foolish dear, don't say that. An imagination is a wonderful thing to have … but like every gift we must possess it and not let it possess us. You take your imaginings a wee bit too seriously. Oh, it's delightful … I know that rapture. But you must learn to keep on this side of the borderline between the real and the unreal. Then the power to escape at will into a beautiful world of your own will help you amazingly through the hard places of life. I can always solve a problem more easily after I've had a voyage or two to the Islands of Enchantment."

when was jealousy ever reasonable?

She knew that at three o'clock that night she would probably think of a brilliant retort she might have made but that did not help her now.

I told Susan my poetry wasn't trash and she wasn't any judge. And she said no, thank goodness she was not and she did not know anything about poetry except that it was mostly a lot of lies. Now you know, Faith, that isn't so. That is one reason why I like writing poetry—you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.

"I didn't say I WOULD run. I said I WANTED to run. That's a different thing. I want to help people, too. But oh, I wish there weren't any ugly, dreadful things in the world. I wish everything was glad and beautiful."

My motto, Walter, is, don't fight till you're sure you ought to, and THEN put every ounce of you into it.

"I think it is just as well to be interested in things as long as you live," she had said. "If you're not, it doesn't seem to me that there's much difference between the quick and the dead."

"When I was fifteen I talked in italics and superlatives too,"

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."