The girl’s beauty and sorrow and loneliness drew her with an irresistible fascination.
After all, it is fairy tales the world wants. Real life is all the “real life” we want. Give us something better in books.
Oh, I don’t know. I’ve come so far short in so many things. I haven’t done what I meant to do when I began to teach last fall. I haven’t lived up to my ideals.” “None of us ever do,” said Mrs. Allan with a sigh. “But then, Anne, you know what Lowell says, ‘Not failure but low aim is crime.’ We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them. With them it’s grand and great. Hold fast to your ideals, Anne.
There is no use in loving things if you have to be torn from them, is there?
Jealousy and stupidity really do most of the harm that is done in the world.
Valancy held Cissy close. She was suddenly happy. Here was someone who needed her – someone she could help. She was no longer a superfluity. Old things had passed away; everything had become new.
There’s a kind of failure that’s the best success.
It just makes me feel glad to be alive – it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?
Prose, rightly written and read, is sometimes as beautiful as poetry.
There is such a place as fairyland – but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way.
Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.
Holmes speaks of grief “staining backward” through the pages of life; but Valancy found her happiness had stained backward likewise and flooded with rose-colour her whole previous drab existence. She found it hard to believe that she had ever been lonely and unhappy and afraid.
It is never pleasant to have our old shrines desecrated, even when we have outgrown them.
The trouble with him seems to be that he hasn’t enough imagination.
I think,” said Mrs. Frederick, “that if a person makes up her mind not to have colds she will not have colds.
Perhaps college may be around the bend in the road, but I haven’t got to the bend yet and I don’t think much about it lest I might grow discontented.
She was always at her best with him, with a delightful feeling of being understood. To love is easy and therefore common – but to understand – how rare it is!
Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something.
The possibilities of making new friends help to make life very fascinating.
When people ask me that absurd question “Do you like children?” I always feel like retorting – and sometimes do, if I think the questioner has brains enough to understand the retort – “Why don’t you ask me if I like grown-up people? I like some very much, detest others, and am indifferent to the vast majority.