I am sure we should not shut our hearts against the healing influences that nature offers us. But I understand your feeling. I think we all experience the same thing. We resent the thought that anything can please us when someone we love is no longer here to share the pleasure with us, and we almost feel as if we were unfaithful to our sorrow when we find our interest in life returning to us.
One June evening, when the orchards were pink-blossomed again, when the frogs were singing silverly sweet in the marshes about the head of the Lake of Shining Waters, and the air was full of the savor of clover fields and balsamic fir woods, Anne was sitting by her gable window. She had been studying her lessons, but it had grown too dark to see the book, so she had fallen into wide-eyed reverie, looking out past the boughs of the Snow Queen, once more bestarred with its tufts of blossom.
I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does.
There are moments when we have real fun because, just for the moment, we don’t think about things and then – we remember – and the remembering is worse than thinking of it all the time would have been.
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!
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, unsharable sorrow which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce it’s infinite mystery– we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call 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.
I have made up my mind that I will never marry. I shall be wedded to my art.
Today has been a day dropped out of June into April.
What a splendid day!′ said Anne, drawing a long breath. ‘Isn’t it good just to be alive on a day like this? I pity the people who aren’t born yet for missing it. They may have good days, of course, but they can never have this one.
Moonlight and the murmur of pines blended together so that one could hardly tell which was light and which was sound.
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.
The year is a book, isn’t it, Marilla? Spring’s pages are written in Mayflowers and violets, summer’s in roses, autumn’s in red maple leaves, and winter in holly and evergreen.
And he wrote, “When the moon rises tonight think of me and I’ll think of you.
If I wasn’t a human girl I think I’d like to be a bee and live among the flowers.
She had always envied the wind. So free. Blowing where it listed. Through the hills. Over the lakes. What a tang, what a zip it had! What a magic of adventure!
Well, that is another hope gone. My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.
Imagination is what you need.
We’ll never say good-bye to each other. We’ll just smile and go.
I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial,” said Anne, rather scornfully. “Nobody would expect two blacksmiths to be violently attracted toward each other merely because they were both blacksmiths.
Anne has as many shades as a rainbow and every shade is the prettiest while it lasts.