#Canadian literature

[theoptia]

Marian Engel, from Notebooks: “Ah, Mon Cahier, čoute”

Text ID: I fade into dreams.

[bsd-bibliophile]

     “Have you no sense of shame?” demanded Uncle James.      “Oh, yes. But the things I am ashamed of are not the things you are ashamed of.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Blue Castle

[feral-ballad]

When I looked at her I wanted both to touch her and watch her from a distance, to hold her and hide from her, to kiss her and ask her to forgive me—

Amal El-Mohtar, from The Honey Month; “Day 1: Fireweed Honey”

[philosophors]

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

— Margaret Atwood, “The Blind Assassin”

[checkoutmybookshelf]

You Have My Attention: Anne of Green Gables First Lines

The icon of Canadian girlhood needs no introduction, as Anne of Green Gables is a global phenomenon at this point. What those of you who read the first book at like age ten and then didn't bother exploring further might not know, however, is that LM Montgomery wrote a whole Anne series. So how did she catch a reader's attention? Let's find out!

"Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof."

-- Anne of Green Gables

"A tall, slim girl, 'half-past sixteen,' with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil."

-- Anne of Avonlea

"'Harvest is ended and summer is gone,' quoted Anne Shirley, gazing across the shorn fields dreamily."

-- Anne of the Island

"(Letter from Anne Shirley, B.A., Principal of Summerside High School, to Gilbert Blythe, medical student at Redmond College, Kingsport.)

Windy Poplars,

Spook's Lane,

S'side, P. E. I.,

Monday, September 12th.

DEAREST:

Isn't that an address!"

-- Anne of the Windy Poplars 

"'Thanks be, I’m done with geometry, learning or teaching it,' said Anne Shirley, a trifle vindictively, as she thumped a somewhat battered volume of Euclid into a big chest of books, banged the lid in triumph, and sat down upon it, looking at Diana Wright across the Green Gables garret, with gray eyes that were like a morning sky."

-- Anne's House of Dreams

"'How white the moonlight is tonight!' said Anne Blythe to herself, as she went up the walk of the Wright garden to Diana Wright's front door, where little cherry-blossom petals were coming down on the salty, breeze-stirred air."

-- Anne of Ingleside

"It was a clear, apple-green evening in May, and Four Winds Harbour was mirroring back the clouds of the golden west between its softly dark shores. The sea moaned eerily on the sand-bar, sorrowful even in spring, but a sly, jovial wind came piping down the red harbour road along which Miss Cornelia’s comfortable, matronly figure was making its way towards the village of Glen St. Mary."

-- Rainbow Valley 

"It was a warm, golden-cloudy, lovable afternoon. In the big living-room at Ingleside Susan Baker sat down with a certain grim satisfaction hovering about her like an aura; it was four o'clock and Susan, who had been working incessantly since six that morning, felt that she had fairly earned an hour of repose and gossip."

-- Rilla of Ingleside

[illustration-alcove]

Sarah Watts's illustrated covers for L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea.

[aniaks]

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.

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

[gennsoup]

We will grow anew. We have been damaged, but we will heal.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Certain Dark Things

[lizzy-bonnet]

L.M. Montgomery really wrote an entire book about the placebo effect.

[intopermanence]

A black hole to swallow me up. The poets keep me company, and I'm damned along with them, in the books and in my room in the country where I read. I read and I dream about hell and about the scarlet sky at the end of hell, like a bright border of flames.

Anne Hébert, trans. by Sheila Fischman, from “Am I Disturbing You?”

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

[theoptia]

Marian Engel, from Notebooks: "Ah, Mon Cahier, čoute"

Text ID: The moon / Rose from the sea like Aphrodite

[bsd-bibliophile]

That’s the worst of growing up, and I’m beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don’t seem half so wonderful to you when you get them.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

[feral-ballad]

I am sad because I love you, because I love you so much, and because I am not a bee to buzz with you lightly. I am not a flower, not a tree, not a rain-hewn stone. I am not a storm or a cresting wave, not a thorn or a vine. I am not the sun stinging the water, not the moon on the snow. I am not a star in the dark. I am not the dew-wet wind, not the cloud-stained dawn. I am only a girl, a small, plain girl, a girl who must smear her lips in honey to be found sweet.

Amal El-Mohtar, from The Honey Month; “Day 28: French Chestnut Honey”

[philosophors]

“I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”

— Margaret Atwood, “Lady Oracle”

[checkoutmybookshelf]

This is possibly the most unfair comparison...how's a girl supposed to CHOOSE? Is both an option?