Nothing mattered much to me for a time there, after you told me you could never love me, Anne. There was nobody else -- there never could be anybody else for me but you. I've loved you ever since that day you broke your slate over my head in school.

Anne "felt instinctively" that romance was peeping at her around a corner.

Everything is new in the spring. Springs themselves are always so new, too. No spring is ever just like any other spring. It always has something of its own to be its own peculiar sweetness.

She asked me what made me do such a thing. That is an awkward question because I often can't tell what makes me do things. Sometimes I do them just to find out what I feel like doing them. And sometimes I do them because I want to have some exciting things to tell my grandchildren.

The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.

Maples are such sociable trees ... They're always rustling and whispering to you.

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.