All quotes

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

But, you see, Jo wasn’t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature, being sad, cross, listless, or energetic, as the mood suggested.

Feeling this, Jo’s burden seemed easier to bear, duty grew sweeter, and life looked more endurable, seen from the safe shelter of her mother’s arms.

She gave him entire confidence, he gave her the help she needed, and both found consolation in the act.

Beth smiled and felt comforted, for the tiny thing seemed to offer its small friendship and remind her that a pleasant world was still to be enjoyed.

We won’t be miserable, but enjoy being together while we wait. We’ll have happy times, for I don’t suffer much, and I think the tide will go out easily, if you help me.

I am sure we should not shut our hearts against the healing influences that nature offers us.

We resent the thought that anything can please us when someone we love is no longer here to share the pleasure with us, and we almost feel as if we were unfaithful to our sorrow when we find our interest in life returning to us.

I’m not ungrateful--and perhaps--when this horrible ache grows a little less--I’ll find that I can go on living.

The thought that it may stop hurting sometimes hurts me worse than all else, Marilla.

Carlo got very fond of me--and his dog-love helped me through that first dreadful year after mother died, when I was alone.

The other great silences, those of death, grief, or destiny, do not belong to us.

a man should, at the first approaches, favour their grief and express some approbation of their sorrow

these things occurring daily and being importunate make the mind little, and narrow, and unsocial, and harsh, and timid, so that, being besieged and taken in hand by grief, it can no longer laugh, and shuns daylight, and avoids society

The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back, I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be.

Many friendships are formed by a community of sensual pleasures: all these will be cut off.

Parents we can have but once; and he promises himself too much, who enters life with the expectation of finding many friends.

Even in the same family the gap is not so great; the wound closes up sooner than we should expect.