It’s not what the world holds for you. It’s what you bring to it.
You must pay the penalty of growing-up, Paul. You must leave fairyland behind you.
She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.
Oh, Marilla, I thought I was happy before. Now I know that I just dreamed a pleasant dream of happiness. This is the reality.
Isn’t it terrible the way some unworthy folks are loved, while others that deserve it far more, you’d think, never get much affection?
Even when I’m alone I have real good company – dreams and imaginations and pretendings. I like to be alone now and then, just to think over things and taste them. But I love friendships – and nice, jolly little times with people.
It’s the worst kind of cruelty – the thoughtless kind. You can’t cope with 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.
She suddenly found herself laughing without bitterness.
You’d find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair.
It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside – but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond – only a glimpse – and heard a note of unearthly music.
Mrs. Lynde says, ‘Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.
When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I am going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes – what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows – what new landscapes – what new beauties – what curves and hills and valleys farther on.
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.