It seems to me a most dreadful thing to go out of the world and not leave one person behind you who is sorry you are gone,' said Anne, shuddering.

All life lessons are not learned at college,'she thought. Life teaches them everywhere.

Doesn't matter what a person's name is as long as he behaves himself.

That's one of the things we learn as we grow older -- how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty.

Valancy herself had never quite relinquished a certain pitiful, shamed, little hope that Romance would come her way yet - never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the fact that she was twenty-nine and unsought by any man. Ay, there lay the sting. Valancy did not mind so much being an old maid. After all, she thought, being an old maid couldn’t possibly be as dreadful as being married to an Uncle Wellignton or an Uncle Benjamin, or even an Uncle Herbert. What hurt her was that she had never had a chance to be anything but an old maid.

Why is it that the nicest things never are healthy?

Anne laughed and sighed. She felt very old and mature and wise — which showed how young she was.