How does Ruby evaluate double quotes (aka "") vs. String.new?

Question

What's the difference in how Ruby initializes a new string with double quotes ("") vs. String.new? For curiosity and experimentation purposes, I overrode String#initialize:

class String
  def initialize
    puts "I <3 bananas" # they're delicious!
  end
end

What I'm trying to figure out is: why are these two examples different?

# Calling the String class directly, I can declare banana love!
irb(main):054:0> String.new
I <3 bananas
=> ""

# Using double quotes, this string is not as tasty :(
irb(main):055:0> ""
=> ""

This is annoying to research because every Google result seems to be focused on basic Ruby syntax, and I haven't been able to find anything in the Ruby documentation.

Answer 1

According to Matz:

String objects for literals are already created in the compile time, which is far before you redefine the initialize method. The individual string objects from literals are just copy of the already allocated and initialized objects. The whole purpose of the initialize method is to initialize newly created objects, as the name suggests. I don't feel any need to call the (redefined) initialize method for string literals, that already initialized at the compile time.