Lm Montgomery Journal Quotes

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

Truth exists, only lies have to be invented.

Fairyland is the loveliest word because it means everything the human heart desires.

What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

In everything you do aim to excel for what is worth doing is worth doing well

A favor is never so long-lived as a grudge.

If any person wants to see clearly just how much she has changed - whether for better or worse - let her revisit after some lapse of time any place where she has ones lived. She will meet her former self at every turn, with every familiar face, in every old recollection ... She will see how much she has gained in some respects, how much she has lost - irretrievably lost - in others.

Truly, the happiness certain things give us is never to be measured by their worldly importance.

After all, it is fairy tales the world wants. Real life is all the "real life" we want. Give us something better in books.

When people ask me that absurd question "Do you like children?" I always feel like retorting - and sometimes do, if I think the questioner has brains enough to understand the retort - "Why don't you ask me if I like grown-up people? I like some very much, detest others, and am indifferent to the vast majority.

How dreadful it would be not to love a cat! How much one would miss out of life.

Jealousy and stupidity really do most of the harm that is done in the world.

It is a start, and I mean to keep on," I find written in my old journal of that year.

Everything speaks of the autumn now. The sea roars hollowly day and night, the fields are bare and sere, bordered by strips of deep-dyed golden-rod, asters, and life-everlasting; and the ponds are blue – blue – not the steely blue of winter or the deep azure of summer, but a clear, steadfast serene blue, as if the water were past all the moods and tenses of passion and had settled down to tranquility.

How I do love books! Not merely to read once but over and over again. I enjoy the tenth reading of a book as much as the first. Books are a delightful world in themselves. Their characters seem as real to me as my friends of actual life.

I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them.

I have an ideal Sunday in my mind. Only, I am such a coward that I cannot translate it into the real, but must drift on with the current of conventionality. But I would like to go away on Sunday morning to the heart of some great solemn wood and sit down among the ferns with only the companionship of the trees and the wood-winds echoing through the dim, moss-hung aisles like the strains of some vast cathedral anthem. And I would stay there for hours alone with nature and my own soul.

I feel tired and lonely and discouraged. Patience, sad heart. There's eternity. This life is only a cloudy day in what may be a succession of varied lifes.

Do you know, that is a question I often ask myself—"If I could would I go back to my old self?" —and I can never answer it. I can never dare to say either "no" or "yes". The fruit of the tree of knowledge may leave a bitter taste in the eater's mouth, but there is something in its flavor that can never be forgotten or counterfeited.

...I wrote a chapter. A burden rolled away from my spirit. And I was suddenly back in my own world with all my dear Avonlea and Glen folks again. It was like going home...

The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, first published by Oxford in 1985, contained half of the journals’ full contents. To save space and present an easily digestible, fast-moving narrative, passages describing Lucy Maud Montgomery’s darker, more reflective moods and her religious and philosophical speculations were cut. This unabridged edition of her early years on Prince Edward Island, however, reveals a different story. Montgomery was a complex and profound personality. She was often anxious, bitter, and gloomy, although able to see herself and her surroundings from a deeply ironic—and often comical—viewpoint. Her unabridged journals demonstrate her ambition and determination to achieve literary success. They also reveal how she used writing to manage her turbulent moods, and how an increasing dependence on her journal helped shape her emotional landscape. This new edition recreates the format Montgomery herself devised. Some 250 of her photographs, newspaper clippings, postcards, and professional portraits are reproduced, all with Montgomery’s original placement and captions. Michael Bliss’s new preface draws some surprising parallels with other great journal writers of Montgomery’s time, while the editors’ new introduction and notes provide indispensable insights into what the journals reveal, as well as what they hide.