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Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery Quotes

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Famous Lucy Maud Montgomery Quotes

“Poor soul, she always knew everything about her neighbors, but she never was very well acquainted with herself.”

“We've had a beautiful friendship, Diana. We've never marred it by one quarrel or coolness or unkind word; and I hope it will always be so. But things can't be quite the same after this. You'll have other interests. I'll just be on the outside.”

“I wish I were dead, or that it were tomorrow night,' groaned Phil.”

“Words aren't made — they grow,' said Anne.”

“But was anything in life, Anne asked herself wearily, like one's imagination of it?”

“I do know my own mind,' protested Anne. 'The trouble is, my mind changes and then I have to get acquainted with it all over again.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods…for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them.”

“You are the only person who loves me in the world," said Elizabeth. "When you talk to me I smell violets.”

“Don't be ridiculous, please.' The most insulting words in the world!”

“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.”

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

“Life owes me something more than it has paid me and I'm going out to collect it.”

“But just think what a dull world it would be if everyone was sensible,' pleaded Anne.”

“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.”

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

“She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.”

“I have a little brown cocoon of an idea that may possibly expand into a magnificent moth of fulfilment.”

“All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world.”

“I feel as if something has been torn suddenly out of my life and left a terrible hole. I feel as if I couldn't be I — as if I must have changed into somebody else and couldn't get used to it. It gives me a horrible lonely, dazed, helpless feeling. It's good to see you again — it seems as if you were a sort of anchor for my drifting soul.”

“Anne’s horizons had closed in since the night she had sat there after coming home from Queen’s; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joys of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road!”

“It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter.”

“Being frightened of things is worse than the things themselves.”

“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, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery — we may only wander, awed and spellbound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only — a mighty voice.”

“...the sorrows God sent us brought comfort and strength with them, while the sorrows we brought on ourselves, through folly or wickedness, were by far the hardest to bear.”

“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.”

“It's good advice, but I expect it will be hard to follow; good advice is apt to be, I think.”

“I've just been imagining that it was really me you wanted after all and that I was to stay here for ever and ever. It was a great comfort while it lasted. But the worst of imagining things is that the time comes when you have to stop and that hurts.”

“Have you ever noticed how many silences there are Gilbert? The silence of the woods....of the shore....of the meadows....of the night....of the summer afternoon. All different because the undertones that thread them are different.”

“I wish we could see perfumes as well as smell them. I'm sure they would be very beautiful.”

“I have a dream," he said slowly. "I persist in dreaming it, although it has often seemed to me that it could never come true. I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends -- and YOU!”

“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.”

“Yes, it's beautiful,' said Gilbert, looking steadily down into Anne's uplifted face, 'but wouldn't it have been more beautiful still, Anne, if there had been no separation or misunderstanding . . . if they had come hand in hand all the way through life, with no memories behind them but those which belonged to each other?”