Anne of Avonlea (Anne of Green Gables, #2)

by L.M. Montgomery

Few things in Avonlea ever escaped Mrs. Lynde. It was only that morning Anne had said: “If you went to your own room at midnight, locked the door, pulled down the blind, and sneezed, Mrs. Lynde would ask you the next day how your cold was!”

Mrs. Lynde looked upon all people who had the misfortune to be born or brought up elsewhere than in Prince Edward Island with a decided can-any-good-thing-come-out-of-Nazareth air.

She can put a whole sermon, text, comment, and application into six words and throw it at you like a brick.”

Anne was a sweet-souled lass, but she could instill some venom into innocent italics when occasion required.

I never was much of a talker till I came to Avonlea and then I had to begin in self-defense or Mrs. Lynde would have said I was dumb and started a subscription to have me taught sign language.

and I think,” concluded Anne, hitting on a very vital truth, “that we always love best the people who need us.

Marilla thought it a good sign that she had recovered sufficiently to adapt a quotation.

“It was in that question Marilla taught me last Sunday. ‘Why should we love God?’ It says, ‘Because He makes preserves, and redeems us.’ Preserves is just a holy way of saying jam.”

This made me laugh out loud!

I’ve prayed every night that God would give me enough grace to enable me to eat every bit of my porridge in the mornings. But I’ve never been able to do it yet, and whether it’s because I have too little grace or too much porridge I really can’t decide.

We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.

Do you know, Mrs. Allan, I’m so thankful for friendship. It beautifies life so much.”

“AFTER ALL,” ANNE had said to Marilla once, “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.”

The world was so beautiful that Anne spent ten blissful minutes hanging idly over the garden gate drinking the loveliness in.

Sounds so glorious

“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.

That’s the worst…or the best…of real life, Anne. It won’t let you be miserable. It keeps on trying to make you comfortable…and succeeding…even when you’re determined to be unhappy and romantic.

You don’t know what your friendship meant to me. I want to thank you here and now, dear, for the warm and true affection you’ve always given me.” “And always, always will,” sobbed Diana. “I shall never love anybody…any girl…half as well as I love you. And if I ever do marry and have a little girl of my own I’m going to name her Anne.”

Crying!!!! Oh my goodness it is too sweet

“Oh, of course there’s a resk in marrying anybody,” conceded Charlotta the Fourth, “but, when all’s said and done, Miss Shirley, ma’am, there’s many a worse thing than a husband.”

It was, of course, tenanted by an ideal master, dark, proud, and melancholy; but oddly enough, Gilbert Blythe persisted in hanging about too, helping her arrange pictures, lay out gardens, and accomplish sundry other tasks which a proud and melancholy hero evidently considered beneath his dignity.

In this world you’ve just got to hope for the best and prepare for the worst and take whatever God sends.”