A collection of quotes from my favorite novel

Green Gables (from my trip to PEI a couple years ago)

"...'Is it not funny nobody ever asked me to marry him, Mrs. Doctor, dear? I am no beauty, but I am as good-looking as most of the married women you see. But I never had a beau. What do you suppose is the reason?'

'It may be predestination,' suggested Anne, with unearthly solemnity.

Susan nodded.

'That is what I have often thought, Mrs. Doctor, dear, and a great comfort it is. I do not mind nobody wanting me if the Almighty decreed it so for His own wise purposes. But sometimes doubt creeps in, Mrs. Doctor, dear, and I wonder if maybe Old Scratch has not more to do with it than anyone else. I cannot feel resigned then. But maybe,' added Susan, brightening up, 'I will have a chance to get married yet. I often and often think of the old verse my aunt used to repeat:

"There never was a goose so gray but sometime soon or late
Some honest gander came her way and took her for his mate!"

A woman cannot ever be sure of not being married till she is buried, Mrs. Doctor, dear, and meanwhile I will make a batch of cherry pies...."



"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 doings, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world."



"I do wish that the custom of calling a dead body 'the remains' could be abolished. I positively shiver when I hear the undertaker say at a funeral, 'All who wish to see the remains please step this way.' It always gives me the horrible impressions that I am about to view the scene of a cannibal feast."



"The harbour was lying black and sullen under a dour November sky; the wet, dead leaves clung drenched and sodden to the window sills; but the little house was gay with firelight and spring-like with Anne's ferns and geraniums.
'It's always summer here, Anne,' Leslie had said one day; and all who were guests at that house of dreams felt the same."



"...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 spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it."



"Captain Jim was a passionate worshipper of beauty. Every lovely think heard or seen gave him a deep, subtle, inner joy that irradiated his life."


"Come and sit down. It won't take long to sit an hour."


"I'll come when I can, and you come when you can, and so long's we have our pleasant little chat it don't matter a mite what roof's over us."


" Captain Jim was buried in the little over-harbour graveyard...His relatives put up a very expensive, very ugly 'monument' - a monument at which he would have poked sly fun had he seen it in life. His real monument was in the hearts of those who knew him...."


***all quotes taken from Anne's House of Dreams.