“I’ve had a splendid time … But the best of it all was the coming home”

The epigraph from L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables gives the novel a quiet measure of departure and return: a life-changing journey may be splendid, but coming home matters most. Its emphasis resonates with Lara Jean Covey’s final reflection on how she and Peter Kavinsky will explain their relationship at college, and with the story’s closing insistence that love and growing up do not make home irrelevant.

The Epigraph

The quotation is spoken by Anne, who concludes that her experience has marked an epoch in her life, then places the greatest value not on the journey itself but on coming home. The movement from “splendid time” to “the best” makes return more than a simple end to travel: it becomes the experience through which the journey acquires its emotional weight.

Echoes in the Ending

Near the novel’s close, Lara Jean considers how she and Peter will answer people who ask how they met. The familiar explanations of growing up together or being high school sweethearts belong, in her view, to other couples; for them, the truest account begins with a love letter. The epigraph’s account of a life marked by experience similarly makes a threshold in life legible through what endures afterward.

The quotation does not resolve the practical uncertainties of leaving for college or define exactly what home will mean as Lara Jean and Peter move into a new stage. Instead, placed before the acknowledgments and beside the novel’s ending, it offers a resonant frame: departure can be exhilarating and consequential, while return remains the measure that gives the experience its fullest meaning.