A Quote for Monday: Lucy Maud Montgomery

"There's plenty of time for you to be grown up, Rilla. Don't wish your youth away. It goes too quickly. You'll begin to taste life soon enough."


"Taste life! I want to eat it," cried Rilla, laughing. "I want everything­, everything a girl can have. I'll be fifteen in another month, and then nobody can say I'm a child any longer. I heard someone say once that the years from fifteen to nineteen are the best years in a girl's life. I'm going to make them perfectly splendid--­just fill them with fun."


This is the high-spirited title heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery's wonderful Rilla of Ingleside.  I dearly love Rilla, even more than her mother, Ann of Green Gables.  The book is not just a great story, but great historical fiction, written soon after the events, of World War I's devastating impact on North American families who sent young men to the war.


Of course, she's wrong that 15-19 is the best time in a girl's life.  It just keeps getting better!  I just can't help but share another quote from Rilla of Ingleside:


"Everything, it seems to me, has to be purchased by self-sacrifice. Our race has marked every step of its painful ascent with blood. And now torrents of it must flow again. No, Mrs. Crawford, I don't think the war has been sent as a punishment for sin. I think it is the price humanity must pay for some blessing - some advance great enough to be worth the price - which we may not live to see but which our children's children will inherit."