Lucy Maud Montgomery Quotes

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves.

It’s so much more romantic to end a story up with a funeral than a wedding.

Anybody is liable to rheumatism in her legs, Anne. It's only old people who should have rheumatism in their souls, though. Thanks goodness, I never have. When you get rheumatism in your soul you might as well go and pick out your coffin.

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.

Since you are determined to be married, Miss Cornelia," said Gilbert solemnly, "I shall give you the excellent rules for the management of a husband which my grandmother gave my mother when she married my father." "Well, I reckon I can manage Marshall Elliott," said Miss Cornelia placidly. "But let us hear your rules." "The first one is, catch him." "He's caught. Go on." "The second one is, feed him well." "With enough pie. What next?" "The third and fourth are-- keep your eye on him.

The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.

It's the worst kind of cruelty — the thoughtless kind. You can't cope with it.

You see," she concluded miserably, "when I can call like that to him across space--I belong to him. He doesn't love me--he never will--but I belong to him.

And if you couldn't be loved, the next best thing was to be let alone.

Comedy and tragedy are so mixed up in life, Gilbert. The only thing that haunts me is that tale of the two who lived together fifty years and hated each other all that time. I can't believe they really did. Somebody has said that 'hate is only love that has missed its way.' I feel sure that under the hatred they really loved each other . . . just as I really loved you all those years I thought I hated you . . . and I think death would show it to them. I'm glad I found out in life.

What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

When I read that the flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.

It was October again ... a glorious October, all red and gold, with mellow mornings when the valleys were filled with delicate mists as if the spirit of autumn had poured them in for the sun to drain - amethyst, pearl, silver, rose, and smoke-blue. The dews were so heavy that the fields glistened like cloth of silver and there were such heaps of rustling leaves in the hollows of many-stemmed woods to run crisply through.

It was really dreadful to be so different from other people…and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were a being strayed from another star.

But feeling is so different from knowing. My common sense tells me all you can say, but there are times when common sense has no power over me. Common nonsense takes possession of my soul.

I'd like to add some beauty to life," said Anne dreamily. "I don't exactly want to make people KNOW more... though I know that IS the noblest ambition... but I'd love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me... to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn't been born.

Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.

Thank goodness air and salvation are still free...and so is laughter.

She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.

How fair the realm Imagination opens to the view.

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.

most people worry so much, they think you're not right if you don't worry.

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.

I wonder what a soul…a person's soul…would look like,' said Priscilla dreamily. 'Like that, I should think,' answered Anne, pointing to a radiance of sifted sunlight streaming through a birch tree. 'Only with shape and features of course. I like to fancy souls as being made of light. And some are all shot through with rosy stains and quivers…and some have a soft glitter like moonlight on the sea…and some are pale and transparent like mist at dawn.

Some nights are like honey - and some like wine - and some like wormwood.

Have you ever noticed that when people say it is their duty to tell you a certain thing you may prepare for something disagreeable? Why is it that they never seem to think it a duty to tell you the pleasant things they hear about you?

No use in taking a cat's opinion of a dog.

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

The body grows slowly and steadily but the soul grows by leaps and bounds. It may come to its full stature in an hour.

We belong to the race that knows Joseph

Mrs. Lynde says, 'Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.

But you have such dimples," said Anne, smiling affectionately into the pretty, vivacious face so near her own. "Lovely dimples, like little dents in cream. I have given up all hope of dimples. My dimple-dream will never come true; but so many of my dreams have that I mustn't complain. Am I all ready now?

She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.

If any person wants to see clearly just how much she has changed - whether for better or worse - let her revisit after some lapse of time any place where she has ones lived. She will meet her former self at every turn, with every familiar face, in every old recollection ... She will see how much she has gained in some respects, how much she has lost - irretrievably lost - in others.

The world is always young again for just a few moments at the dawn.

A cold in the head in June is an immoral thing.

But it ain't our feelings we have to steer by through life--no, no, we'd make shipwreck mighty often if we did that. There's only the one safe compass and we've got to set our course by that--what it's right to do.

Plum puffs can't minister to a mind diseased or a world that's crumbling to pieces

she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

You can't have many exclamation points left,' thought Anne, 'but no doubt the supply of italics is inexhaustible.

Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends; but it is sometimes a little lonely to be surrounded everywhere by happiness that is not your own.

There are many worse friends than the soft, silent, furry, cat-folk.

When twilight drops her curtain down And pins it with a star Remember that you have a friend Though she may wander far.

“You 're not eating anything,” said Marilla sharply, eying her as if it were a serious shortcoming. Anne sighed. “I can 't. I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?”

Don't be led away by those howls about realism. Remember-pine woods are just as real as pigsties and a darn sight pleasanter to be in.

Heretics are wicked, but they're mighty int'resting. It's jest that they've got sorter lost looking for God, being under the impression that He's hard to find - which He ain't never.