Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes & Sayings

I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Failures aren't failures if you learn something from them ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners
do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay
and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern
and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place
here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now
arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back - it does not matter which. Because they know they
are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by
it. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The most exhausting thing you can do is to be inauthentic. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

How hard it is to have the beautiful interdependence of marriage and yet be strong in oneself alone. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

God often used bitter experiences to make us better. Gold can be a helpful servant, but a cruel master. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them
like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It was a magic caused by the collision of modern methods and old ones; modern history and ancient; accessibility and isolation. And it was a magic which could only strike spark about that time. A few years earlier, from the point of view of aircraft alone, it would have been impossible to reach these places; a few later, and there will be no such isolation. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. Look at us. We run a tightrope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now! This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

It isn't for the moment you are stuck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity, faith and security. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Woman's life today is tending more and more toward ... 'Zerrissenheit'
torn to pieces-hood. She cannot live perpetually in 'Zerrissenheit.' She will be shattered into a thousand pieces. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Certain environments, certain modes of life, and certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification is one of them. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Life itself is always pulling you away from the understanding of life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Splutter, splutter. Yes - we're off - we're rising. But why start off with an engine like that? But it smooths out now, like a long sigh, like a person breathing easily, freely. Like someone singing ecstatically, climbing, soaring - sustained note of power and joy. We turn from the lights of the city; we pivot on a dark wing; we roar over the earth. The plane seems exultant now, even arrogant. We did it, we did it! — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One writes not to be read but to breathe ... one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes
in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer
you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down on the still world below the choppy waves - it will always remain magic. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If one talks to more than four people, it is an audience; and one cannot really think or exchange thoughts with an audience. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

To be deeply in love is, of course, a great liberating force. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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 — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The nice thing about really intelligent people is that when you talk with them they make you feel intelligent too ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The final lesson of learning to be independent - widowhood ... is the hardest lesson of all. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I promise to respect and protect your aloneness, knowing that everything created must have its period of darkness: child and bulb, poem and personality. I promise not to pry into your loneliness, never to tear at the bud with frightened fingers to make sure there is a flower inside. I believe in the flower. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

My Life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources; it belonds to that natural order of giving that seems to renew iself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has to give - like milk in the breast ... Even purposeful giving must have some source that refills it. The milk in the breast must be replenished by food taken into the body. If it is [our] function to give, [we] must be replenished too. But how? Every person should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

For the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We are always bargaining with our feelings so that we can live from day to day. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Why is life speeded up so? Why are things so terribly, unbearably precious that you can't enjoy them but can only wait breathless in dread of their going? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Every relationship seems simple at its start. Two people listening to each other, two shells meeting each other, making one world between them. There are no others in the perfect unity of that instant, no other people or things or interests. It is free of ties or claims, unburdened by responsibilities, by worry about the future or debts to the past. And then how swiftly, how inevitably the perfect unity is invaded; the relationship changes; it becomes complicated, encumbered by its contact with the world. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I should like to be a full-time Mother and a full-time Artist and a full-time Wife-Companion and also a 'Charming Woman' on the side! And to be aware and record it all. I cannot do it all. Something must go - several things probably. The 'charming woman' first! — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We insist on permanency, on continuity, when the only continuity possible is in growth, in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass but partners in the same pattern. The only real security in a relationship lies neither in looking back in nostalgia, nor forward with dread or anticipation, but living in the present and accepting the relationship as it is now. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

No man is an island,' said John Donne. I feel we are all islands -- in a common sea. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

These bright roofs, these steep towers, these jewel-lakes, these skeins of railroad line - all spoke to her and she answered. She was glad they were there. She belonged to them and they to her. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Only with winter-patience can we bring the deep-desired, long-awaited Spring. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I am beginning to respect the apathetic days. Perhaps they're a necessary pause: better to give in to them than to fight them at your desk hopelessly; then you lose both the day and your self-respect. Treat them as physical phenomena
casually
and obey them. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense - no - but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One longs to explain, to be sure they understand, the people one loves. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls - women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action, and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, over-reaching and over-straining ourselves in the unnatural effort ... In our breathless attempts we often miss the flowering that waits for afternoon. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

No American can understand the need for time
that is, simply space to breathe. If you have ten minutes to spare you should jam that full instead of leaving it
as space around your next ten minutes. How can anything ripen without those 'empty' ten minutes? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt A pain undiagnosable but felt. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I begin to shed my Martha-like anxiety about many things. Washable slipcovers, faded and old - I hardly see them; I don't worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Tragedy is the common lot of man. 'So many people have lost children' I remind myself. pp 178-179
This tragedy is such an inextricable part of my story that it cannot be left out of an honest record. Suffering - no matter how multiplied - is always individual. p 179 — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. [...] Our grandmothers, and even - with some scrambling - our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

People talk about 'sex' as though it hopped about by itself, like a frog! — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One can never pay in gratitude: one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It's funny how you can be mad at someone one moment and want to hug them the next. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

My diaries were written primarily, I think, not to preserve the experience but to savor it, to make it even more real, more visible and palpable, than in actual life. For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Fame separates you from life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We all wish to be loved alone. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Woman must come of age by herself
she must find her true center alone. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Charles Morgan describes as the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh