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"Your picture of social triumphs is quite fascinating, Phil, but I'll paint one to offset it. I'm going home to an old country farmhouse, once green, rather faded now, set among leafless apple orchards. There is a brook below and a December fir wood beyond, where I've heard harps swept by the fingers of rain and wind. There is a pond nearby that will be gray and brooding now. There will be two oldish ladies in the house, one tall and thin, one short and fat; and there will be two twins, one a perfect model, the other what Mrs. Lynde calls a 'holy terror'. There will be a little room upstairs over the porch, where old dreams hang thick, and a big, fat, glorious feather bed which will almost seem the height of luxury after a boarding house mattress. How do you like my picture, Phil?" "It seems a very dull one," said Phil, with a grimace. "Oh, but I've left out the transforming thing," said Anne softly. "There'll be love there, Phil -- faithful, tender love, such as I'll never find anywhere else in the world -- love that's waiting for *me*. That makes my picture a masterpiece, doesn't it even if the colors are not very brilliant?" - Anne of the Island |
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| Quotes from Lucy Maud Montgomery's Classic Stories |
| "I think the nicest thing about days is their unexpectedness," went on Rilla. "It's jolly to wake up like this on a golden- fine morning and day-dream for ten minutes before I get up, imagining the heaps of splendid things that may happen before night." ~ Rilla of Ingleside |
"Poetry has vanished from the gulf forever," he said, more to himself than to the girls. "When I was a boy that gulf there would be dotted with white sails on a day like this. Now there's nothing but gasoline boats and they're not on speaking terms with romance at all. Romance is vanishing out of our world." - Marigold Entertains |
| "Fear is the original sin," wrote John Foster. "Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading." ~The Blue Castle |
| "If it's IN you to climb you must--there are those who MUST lift their eyes to the hills--they can't breathe properly in the valleys." - Emily of New Moon |
| "Anne, are you killed?" shrieked Diana, throwing herself on her knees beside her friend. "Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you're killed." To the immense relief of all the girls, and especially of Josie Pye, who, in spite of lack of imagination, had been seized with horrible visions of a future branded as the girl who was the cause of Anne Shirley's early and tragic death, Anne sat dizzily up and answered uncertainly: "No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious." "Where?" sobbed Carrie Sloane. "Oh, where, Anne?" - AOGG |
"If voices had colour, hers would have been like a rainbow. It made words live. Whatever she said became a breathing entity, not a mere verbal statement or utterance." ~ The Story Girl |
| Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one's life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one's side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart it's pages betrayed the rhythm and the music; perhaps... perhaps... love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath. - Anne of Avonlea |
| "Oh, no. I wouldn't want to marry anybody who was wicked, but I think I'd like it if he could be wicked and wouldn't. Now, Fred is hopelessly good." "You'll have more sense some day, I hope," said Marilla. -Anne of the Island |
| "Experience teaches sense. You can't learn it in a college course. You've been to college four years and I never was, but I know heaps more than you do, young ladies." -Aunt Jamesina in 'Anne of the Island' |
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| Graphics by Penny Parker Penny's Place in Cyberspace |