“Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into ones life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to ones side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed ...”

“It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”

“Anne laughed."I don't want sunbursts or marble halls, I just want you.”

“But pearls are for tears, the old legend says," Gilbert had objected."I'm not afraid of that. And tears can be happy as well as sad. My very happiest moments have been when I had tears in my eyeswh...”

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

“Oh, Marilla, I thought I was happy before. Now I know that I just dreamed a pleasant dream of happiness. This is the reality.”

“People talk about the beauty of the spring, but I can't see it. The trees are brown and bare, slimy with rain. Some are crawling with new purple hairs. And the buds are bulging like tumorous acne, ...”

“It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.”

“Too much sun after a Syracuse winter does strange things to your head, makes you feel strong, even if you aren't.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”