ive said it before and i’ll say it again. michael cuthbert’s passing away ruined marilla and matthew’s lives forever. not only because they lost a brother, but because their mother was grieving so hard that she basically forgot her other babies. she fell into an immobilizing depression, forcing matthew and marilla to leave school to help on the farm and around the house. their key desires (marriage, travel, literally anything else) were put on a major league hold and by the time their mother died and left them on their own in the world, it was just too late. my heart breaks for them both every time i watch awae.
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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
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"Many people have told me that they regretted Matthew's death in Green Gables. I regret it myself. If I had the book to write over again I would spare Matthew for several years. But when I wrote it I thought he must die, that there might be a necessity for self-sacrifice on Anne's part, so poor Matthew joined the long procession of ghosts that haunt my literary past."
— Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Alpine Path
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