Best Of L.M. Montgomery's "The Tangled Web"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from The Tangled Web by L.M. Montgomery
A caution: if these quotes inspire you to read The Tangled Web, please be warned that the book ends (literally the last sentence) with racial slurs. More about that here.
Also, I read this on a strange copy on my e-reader and I don't have page numbers for this one.
“Decency’s a dull dog,” retorted Aunt Becky. “I parted company with it long ago."
She longed for freedom, as all women do, but had sense enough to understand that real freedom is impossible in this kind of a world, the lucky people being those who can choose their masters, so she never made the mistake of kicking uselessly over the traces. Sometimes she was mean, treacherous and greedy. Sometimes she was generous, faithful and unselfish. In short, she was an average person who had lived as long as anybody should live.’
It is a still more staggering thing to have your hate suddenly dissolve into love, as though your very bones had melted to water. It rather lets you down.
Gay felt greedy of beauty. She wanted every kind all at once, now when life itself seemed just on the point of breaking into some marvellous blossom and all the coming days were in a hurry to be born. Youth is like that. It wants everything at once, not realizing that something must be saved for autumn days. Save? Nonsense! Pour it all out now, a libation to the approaching god.
But the miracle of love renewed itself every springtime.
And they would always be together—always. On rough paths and smooth. Dawns and twilights would be more beautiful because they would be together.
Sunday was a flame, Monday a rainbow, Tuesday a perfume, Wednesday a bird-song, Thursday a wind-dance, Friday laughter, and Saturday—Noel always came Saturday night, whatever other night he missed—was something that was the soul of all the other six.
Always it was there, her home—her real and only home—luring, repellent, scornful, desirable by turns.
Sometimes she spoke her mind with astonishing vim.
Oh, it was good to feel vivid and interested and alive again—as she hadn’t felt for so long. All the lost colour and laughter of life seemed to have returned. The time of apple-blossom love was over. Nothing could bring it back. It was the time of roses now—the deep, rich roses of the love of womanhood. Those months of suffering had made a woman of Gay. She lifted up her arms in rapture as if to caress the night—the beautiful silvery September night.
Things weren’t interesting when people were too polite. Aunt Becky had never been too polite. That was why her levees had been so interesting.
