My hope is that this life is not all there is. This life is like preparation for what is coming next, and what is coming next is something so glorious that the Bible says minds can't conceive it, eye has never seen, your imagination could never even enter into all that God is preparing for those who love him.

Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts." The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments. The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.

Looking back on a happy life, one realizes that one was not happy all the time.

Who would endure life if it were not for the hope of death?

I am quite likely to re-act to the opposite extreme - to feel rapturously that the world is beautiful and mere existence something to thank God for. I suppose our 'blues' are the price we have to pay for our temperament. 'The gods don't allow us to be in their debt.' They give us sensitiveness to beauty in all its forms but the shadow of the gift goes with it.

Well, that was life. Gladness and pain...hope and fear...and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart...learn to love it and then let it go in turn. Spring, lovely as it was, must yield to summer and summer lose itself in autumn. The birth...the bridal...the death...

Heaven must be very beautiful, of course, the Bible says so — but, Anne, it won't be what I've been used to.

But was anything in life, Anne asked herself wearily, like one's imagination of it? It was the old diamond disillusion of childhood repeated - the same disappointment she had felt when she had first seen the chill sparkle instead of the purple splendor she had anticipated. That's not my idea of a diamond, she had said.

we lost our son, Anne, as did many others, but we have our memories of him and souls cannot die. We can still walk with Walter in the spring.

And every day in heaven will be more beautiful than the one before it Davy, assured Anne.

He who accepts human love must bind it to his soul with pain, and she is not lost to me. Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

Marilla felt this and was vaguely troubled over it, realizing that the ups and downs of existence woudl probably bear hardly on this impulsive soul and not sufficiently understanding that the equally great capacity for delight might more than compensate.