Lucy Maud Montgomery:
(November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942).
Published as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a collection of novels, essays, short stories, and poetry beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. She published 20 novels as well as 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays.
It was November—the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind songs in the pines.
“crimson sunsets”:
Visual image evoking the fiery, fleeting beauty of late-autumn evenings
“parting birds”:
Symbol of migration, loss, and the melancholy of endings as birds fly south
“deep, sad hymns of the sea”:
Personifies the ocean’s sound as mournful music—nature in quiet grief
“passionate wind songs in the pines”:
Contrasts the sea’s sadness with a wilder, more emotional energy in the wind.
🍂 Thematic Significance:
– ‘November as liminal space’:
The month sits between the vibrancy of autumn and the stark dormancy of winter, making it a natural symbol for transition, farewell, and quiet sorrow.
– ‘Synesthetic nature writing’:
Montgomery blends sound (“hymns,” “songs”), sight (“crimson”), and movement (“parting,” “wind”) to create an immersive, almost musical description of the season.
– ‘Romantic nature tradition’:
This reflects a broader ‘Romantic/Victorian literary convention’ of treating nature as emotionally expressive—landscapes mirror human feelings of nostalgia, loss, and passion.
✍️ Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Canadian author famous for the “Anne of Green Gables” series.
– ‘Style fingerprint’:
The lush, poetic description of nature, the personification of seasons, and the lyrical cataloguing of sensory images are all hallmarks of Montgomery’s prose style, especially in the “Anne” books and other Prince Edward Island–set novels (“Anne of Avonlea”, “Anne of the Island”, “The Story Girl”, etc.).
– ⚠️ Caveat:
‘I cannot verify with certainty the ‘exact’ book, chapter, or page this specific line comes from’. Montgomery frequently opened chapters with seasonal descriptions like this one, so it’s consistent with her broader body of work.
It was a lovely afternoon—such an afternoon as only September can produce when summer has stolen back for one more day of dream and glamour.
Montgomery captures that special, almost magical quality of certain September days: moments when—after summer has technically ended—the warmth and light unexpectedly return, as if summer has reclaimed one last day before autumn truly sets in. The words “dream and glamour” evoke an enchanting, fleeting atmosphere; the moment is beautiful precisely because you know it cannot last. It is a classic example of Montgomery’s lyrical, nature-attuned writing style, in which the landscape and weather often reflect or shape the characters’ emotional states. The sentence has become a beloved quote that perfectly articulates that bittersweet, golden feeling of early autumn: summer’s final encore before it definitively gives way to the fall season.
Origin:
It is the opening sentence of “Emily Climbs” setting the scene for a September afternoon in the continuation of the story of Emily Byrd Starr.
Author: L. M. Montgomery,
the Canadian writer best known for “Anne of Green Gables”.
For the rest of the vacation, there was hardly a day when they did not go up to it. Preferably in the long, smoky, delicious August evenings when the white moths sailed over the tansy plantation, and the golden twilight faded into dusk and purple over the green slopes beyond, and fireflies lighted their goblin torches by the pond.
This is ‘not a proverb or common “saying”’; it is a ‘literary passage’ describing a beloved place the children visit during the rest of their summer vacation.
– “There was hardly a day when they did not go up to it” means:
➜ They went there ‘almost every day’.
– The rest of the passage paints a dreamy, nostalgic late-summer scene:
– “long, smoky, delicious August evenings” = hazy, warm, beautiful evenings in late summer.
– “white moths sailed” = moths moved gently through the air, like little boats.
– “tansy plantation” = a large patch of tansy, a yellow-flowered herb.
– “fireflies lighted their goblin torches” = fireflies are imagined as tiny magical creatures carrying lights.
Overall, the passage conveys ‘childhood wonder, enchantment, and the magical beauty of nature’. 🌿✨
📚 Author:
L. M. Montgomery, full name Lucy Maud Montgomery.
– Work: “Rainbow Valley”
– First published: 1919
– Series: Part of the “Anne of Green Gables” books
– Context: The “it” refers to “Rainbow Valley”, a favorite outdoor play-place of the children.
🖋️ About L. M. Montgomery:
Lucy Maud Montgomery was a Canadian author best known for creating “Anne Shirley” in “Anne of Green Gables”. Her writing often features:
– vivid descriptions of Prince Edward Island landscapes 🌅
– childhood imagination
– romantic, poetic nature imagery
– a strong sense of nostalgia and wonder
A cold in the head in June is an immoral thing.
The line captures a very human sentiment: getting a summer cold feels like an offense against nature itself. June is the month of warmth, vitality, long days, and blooming things — the very peak of the year’s promise. To be laid low by a stuffy, drippy head cold in the middle of all that beauty and energy isn’t just unfortunate, it’s almost a ‘moral failing’ — as if the sufferer has somehow let the season down, or the universe has played a spectacularly unfair trick. It’s comic exaggeration, of course, but anyone who has sneezed their way through a glorious June afternoon knows exactly what Montgomery means.
Context:
Montgomery wrote it in “Anne of Windy Poplars” (1936), one of the later novels in her “Anne of Green Gables” series, narrated largely through letters from Anne Shirley. Montgomery had a gift for this kind of wry, affectionate observation about the rhythms of nature and daily life — she wrote elsewhere, for instance, “I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.”
Interestingly, there’s a companion quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that seems to have inspired or rhymed with Montgomery’s sentiment: “June comes in with roses in her hand, but very often with a thick shawl on her shoulders, and a bad cold in her head” — suggesting the idea of June being incompatible with colds was already in literary circulation before Montgomery gave it its pithiest form.
I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.
This is not an old proverb, but rather a ‘literary quote’ with a poetic charge.
🌸 Symbolic meaning of “always June”:
“June” often evokes associations with:
– blossoming and beauty
– warmth and light
– youth and joie de vivre
– carefree
– a sense of abundance and hope
💭 What does the quote express?
The quote articulates a longing for a world that:
– is always beautiful and gentle
– never wilts or ages
– constantly remains in a state of promise and bloom
In other words: it is a ‘romantic musing’ about an ideal, almost paradisiacal state.
👩🦰 Author:
– L. M. Montgomery
Full name: Lucy Maud Montgomery
Canadian writer, best known for the “Anne of Green Gables” series. Source📚 📖 :
– Book: “Anne of the Island”
– Year: 1915
📝 Context:
The quote fits Montgomery’s style well:
– dreamy
– sensitive to nature
– nostalgic
– full of wonder at seasons, beauty, and inner life
🌼 Interpretation in one sentence:
The quote expresses a ‘longing for an eternal state of beauty, softness, hope, and summer bloom’.
You have to remember to be thankful. But in May, one simply can’t help being thankful that they are alive, if for nothing else.
November is usually such a disagreeable month as if the year had suddenly found out that she was growing old and could do nothing but weep and fret over it. This year is growing old gracefully, just like a stately old lady who knows she can be charming even with gray hair and wrinkles. We’ve had lovely days and delicious twilights.
I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.
The sentence expresses ‘joy, gratitude, and wonder at the beauty of October’, especially its autumn colors and atmosphere. It reflects an optimistic ability to find happiness in nature and in the changing seasons.
In a broader sense, it celebrates ‘appreciating life’s simple pleasures’.
📖 Origin:
The quotation comes from the novel “Anne of Green Gables”, first published in 1908. It is spoken by the imaginative heroine “Anne Shirley” while admiring the autumn landscape.
The fuller passage reads:
> “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?”
It appears in Chapter 16, “Diana Is Invited to Tea with Tragic Results.”
✍️ Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Commonly credited as L. M. Montgomery (1874–1942), was a Canadian author best known for the “Anne of Green Gables” series.
Snow in April is abominable,” said Anne. “Like a slap in the face when you expected a kiss.”
Today has been a day dropped out of June into April.
March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.
March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.
They captured in their ramble all the mysteries and magics of a March evening. Very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great, white, brooding silence—a silence which was yet threaded through with many little silvery sounds which you could hear if you hearkened as much with your soul as your ears. The girls wandered down a long pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into the heart of a deep-red, overflowing winter sunset.
But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them.
