Por fin conozco a Anne of Green Gables

This year I learned:
*Anne of Green Gables was on my mother's top ten favorite book list.
*Anne of Green Gables was a book that my dear friend Alisa loved.
I also read references to this book in a Power of Moms article.
I felt like it was time for me to discover what all of the fuss was about. I have never even seen the movies or anything. It was fun reading this book as the mother of a girl about Anne's age when she arrived at Green Gables.

p.126. "There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting."

p.138. "There must be a limit to the mistakes one person can make, and when I get to the end of them, then I'll be through with them. That's a very comforting thought."

p.139. "For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature. All "spirit and fire and dew," as she was, the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity...The downfall of some dear hope or plan punged Anne into "deeps of affliction." The fulfillment thereof exalted her to dizzy realms of delight. Marilla had almost begun to despair of ever fashioning this waif of the world into her model little girl of demure manners and prim deportment. Neither would she have believed that she really liked Anne much better as she was. "

p.219, "Oh, it's delightful to have ambitions. I'm so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them- that's the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting."

p.224, "For we pay a price for everything we get or take in this world; and although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply won, but exact their dues of work and self-denial, anxiety and discouragement."

p.238. "The beauty of it all thrilled Anne's heart, and she gratefully opened the gates of her soul to it. 'Dear old world, she murmured, 'you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.,"
(I felt this way this past summer both while boating at Lake Powell one morning, and while riding bikes down Provo Canyon on Labor Day.)


After I typed up these quotes that I connected with during my reading, I found that several of them were on "top ten" lists.  I love it when literature can speak to so many about things like emotion, that all humans have in common. That entertaining familiarity is what makes this book a classic.