Mrs. Cadbury: Tell me what you know about yourself. Anne Shirley: Well, it really isn't worth telling, Mrs. Cadbury... but if you let me tell you what I IMAGINE about myself you'd find it a lot more interesting.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of imagination and self-perception over mere facts about oneself.
Anne Shirley's response highlights a deeper truth about human nature: our self-identity and potential are often shaped more by our imagination and aspirations than by the reality of who we are at the moment. She suggests that the way we envision our future selves can be more engaging and meaningful to others than a mere recounting of our current traits and experiences.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-belief and potential.
A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.
A house isn't a home without the ineffable contentment of a cat with its tail folded about its feet. A cat gives mystery, charm, suggestion.
Gilbert darling, don't let's ever be afraid of things. It's such dreadful slavery. Let's be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let's dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins!" (Anne to Gilbert)
Youth is not a vanished thing but something that dwells forever in the heart.
I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.
She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.
It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender
Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.
I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.
Beware of those who weep with realization, for they have realized nothing.
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