Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it - like a secret vice!

Not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.

And so I miss the fertilization that might come from a contact. And for me
yes, I think I might as well admit it
fertilization does come a great deal from contacts. Why then do I avoid them
in a sort of false pride
shyness
timorous modesty? I used to be afraid of falling in love with people
or having them think I was
that I was chasing them (how ridiculous
I am actually always running away!) but now surely
I should be mature enough to be over that. I am no longer afraid of falling in love, and the other false modesties should vanish. I cannot bear to think "par delicatesse j'ai perdu ma vie." (Because of discretion I have lost my life).

The most exhausting thing you can do is to be inauthentic.

Don't wish me happiness
I don't expect to be happy all the time ...
It's gotton beyond that somehow.
Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor.
I will need them all.

Both halves of this delicate bivalve are exactly matched. Each side, like the wing of a butterfly, is marked with the

No new sect ever had humor; no disciples either, even the disciples of Christ.

I sometimes think that perhaps our minds are too weak to grasp joy or sorrow except in small things ... In the big things joy and sorrow are just alike - overwhelming. At least, we only get them bit by bit, in tiny flashes - in waves - that our minds can't stand for very long. p 199

Geniuses were like storms or cyclones, pulling everything into their path, sticks and stones and dust.

A day out of season, stopping the monotonous count of summer days. Stopping, too, one's own summer routine, so that, looking out on the gray skies, one says not only, 'What time of year is it?' but, 'What time of life am I in? Where am I? What am I doing?

It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feelings one can go through in one day.

One comes in the end to realize that there is no permanent pure-relationship and there should not be. It is not even something to be desired. The pure relationship is limited, in space and in time. In its essence it implies exclusion. It excludes the rest of life, other relationships, other sides of personality, other responsibilities, other possibilities in the future. It excludes growth.

It's as if you've been walking against a great wind all your life, and then the wind is gone, and you can't walk.

We tend not to choose the unknown which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. And yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching. In so many ways this

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

Growth in awareness has always been painful [...] But it does lead to greater independence and, eventually, cooperation in action. For the enormous problems that face the world today, in both the private and public sphere, cannot be solved by women - and men - alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.

We have had three appalling weeks, the kind one hardly believes while one is going through it. And afterwards, as now, it seems quite unbelievable - except for the inexplicable weariness. Written down it sounds merely funny.

Seems to me the most beautiful thing on earth, perhaps because it is unearthly, and the touch of God in us: the miracle of mercy, the unexpected, the arms of the prodigal son's father, the ravens bringing food in the night, the cup running over.

The good past is so far away and the near past is so horrible and the future is so perilous, that the present has a chance to expand into a golden eternity of here and now.

For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well

For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the serenity of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.

Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people - It just isn't living at all.

We all wish to be loved alone.

I believe that what a woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly. What we fear is not so much that our energy may be leaking away through small outlets as that it may be going down the drain.

Packing is chiefly planning
if it is

Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air. Mountain ranges, no longer seen in profile, dwarf to anthills; seas lose their horizons; lakes have no longer depth but look like bright pennies on the earth's surface; forests become a thin impermanent film, a moss on the top of a wet stone, easily rubbed off. But rivers, which from the ground one usually sees only in cross sections, like a small sample of ribbon -- rivers stretch out serenely ahead as far as the eye can reach. Rivers are seen in their true stature.

They tumble down mountain sides; they meander through flat farm lands. Valleys trail them; cities ride them; farms cling to them; roads and railroad tracks run after them -- and they remain, permanent, possessive. Next to them, man's gleaming cement roads which he has built with such care look fragile as paper streamers thrown over the hills, easily blown away. Even the railroads seem only scratched in with pen-knife. But rivers have carved their way over the earth's face for centuries and they will stay.

The plane seems exultant now, even arrogant. We did it, we did it! We're up, above you. We were dependant on you just now, prisoners fawning on you for favors, for wind and light. But now, we are free. We are up! We are off! Like someone singing ecstatically, climbing, soaring- a sustained note of power and joy.

People don't want to be understood - I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left. They don't want complete sympathy or complete understanding. They want to be treated carelessly and taken for granted lots of times.

In our family an experience was not finished, nor truly experienced, unless written down and shared with another.

People are like that here. Strangers smile at you on the beach, come up and offer you a shell, for no reason, lightly, and then go by and leave you alone again. Nothing is demanded of you in payment, no social rite expected, no tie established. It was a gift, freely offered, freely taken, in mutual trust. People smile at you here, like children, sure that you will not rebuff them, that you will smile back. And you do, because you know it will involve nothing. The smile, the act, the relationship is hung in space, in the immediacy and purity of the present; suspended on the still point of here and now; balanced there, on a shaft of air, like a seagull.

The pure relationship, how beautiful it is! How easily it is damaged, or weighed down with irrelevancies - not even irrelevancies, just life itself, the accumulations of life and of time. For the first part of every relationship is pure, whether it be with friend or lover, husband or child. It is pure, simple and unencumbered.

Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.

When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music
then, and then only are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeded.

To me there is something completely and satisfyingly restful in that stretch of sea and sand, sea and sand and sky - complete peace, complete fulfillment.

Communication with another person
wasn't it the realest thing in life?

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness.

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done ... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.

At whatever point one opens Gift from the Sea, to any chapter or page, the author's words offer a chance to breathe and to live more slowly. The book makes it possible to quiet down and rest in the present, no matter what the circumstances may be. Just to read it - a little of it or in its entirety - is to exist for a while in a different and more peaceful tempo. Even the sway and flow of language and cadence seem to me to make reference to the easy, inevitable movements of the sea.

These values are signposts toward another way of living: simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life; balance of physical, intellectual, and spiritual life; work without pressure; space for significance and beauty; time for solitude and sharing; closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life.

There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change

When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.

I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.

If it is a woman's function to give, she must be replenished, too.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.

The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.

It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.

This beautiful image is to my mind the one that women could hold before their eyes. This is an end toward which we could strive - to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations and activities.

Why do progress and beauty have to be so opposed? ; 75
Also, as in war, the case, like a great bubbling cauldron of life itself, threw up both good and evil. Greed, madness, cruelty and indifference were countered by goodness, devotion, self-sacrifice, and courage. p 178

But the bond - the bond of romantic love is something else. It has so little to do with propinquity or habit or space or time or life itself. It leaps across all of them, like a rainbow - or a glance.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.

You can't just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else's appreciation.

People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that
just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden.

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations ...

Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass. Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves.

Is it not rather ugly, one may ask? One collects material possessions not only for security, comfort or vanity, but for beauty as well. Is your sea-shell house not ugly and bare? No, it is beautiful, my house. It is bare, of course, but the wind, the sun, the smell of the pines blow through its bareness. The unfinished beams in the roof are veiled by cobwebs. They are lovely, I think, gazing up at them with new eyes;

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom.

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of "coming of age" -to learn how to stand alone.

Who is not afraid of pure space - that breathtaking empty space of an open door?

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

What has made the day so perfect ? To begin with , it is a pattern of freedom. It's setting has not been cramped in space or time. An island, curiously enough, gives a limitless feeling or both. Nor has the day been limited in kinds of activity. It has a natural balance of physical, intellectual and social life. It has an easy unforced rhythm. Work is not deformed by pressure. Relationship is not strangled by claims. Intimacy is tempered by lightness of touch. We have moved through our day like dancers not needing to touch more than lightly because we were instinctively moving to the same rhythm.

The ball of rumor and criticism, once it starts rolling, is difficult to stop.

I had the feeling, when the thoughts first clarified on paper, that my experience was very different from other people's. (Are we all under this illusion?)

Beautiful, fragile, fleeting, the sunrise shell; but not, for all that, illusory. Because it is not lasting, let us not fall into the cynic's trap and call it an illusion. Duration is not a test of true or false. The day of the dragon-fly or the night of the Saturnid moth is not invalid simply because that phase in its life cycle is brief. Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. "And what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place." The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.

I do not like talking casually to people - it does not interest me - and most of them are unwilling to talk at all seriously.

For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life.

America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.

Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages.

The world has different owners at sunrise ... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears.

Love is a force ... It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product. It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.

The final lesson of learning to be independent - widowhood ... is the hardest lesson of all.

I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes.

Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.

Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century.

Am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, May the outward and inward man be at one.

There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.

I can conceive of 'falling in love' over and over again. But 'marriage,' this richness of life itself, I cannot conceive of having again - or with anyone else. In this sense 'marriage' seems to me indissoluble.

Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction ... What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.

I feel I should not be ... so at the mercy of people's regard. And yet - it is the artist's desire for communication too; without the answering voice you get so numb; you lose faith in your powers to communicate.

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured.

To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.

Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly.

I want to be pure in heart
but I like to wear my purple dress.

The acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty

Writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

I feel a hunger now- a real hunger-for letting the pool still itself & seeing the reflections.

Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls
woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.

Go for a short walk in a soft rain - lovely - so many wild flowers startling me through the woods and a lawn sprinkled with dandelions, like a night with stars. And through it all the sound of soft rain like the sound of innumerable earthworms stirring in the ground.

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt A pain undiagnosable but felt.

I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central cor to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints -to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony ...

Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.