Anne Lindbergh Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

War is a thug's game. The thug strikes first and harder. He doesn't go by rules and he isn't afraid of hurting people. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there. Enjoy the moment, even if it means merely a walk in the country. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

But I want first of all- in fact, as an end to these other desires- to be at peace with myself. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Once you get beyond the crust of the first pang it is all the same and you can easily bear it. It is just the transition from painlessness to pain that is so terrible. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

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 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 ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it, What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now! — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

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

There is no harvest for the heart alone. The seed of love must be eternally re-sown. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

Travel Far, Pay No Fare ... a book can take you anywhere. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

One learns first of all in beach living the art of sheding;how little one can get along with, not how much ... To say-is it necessary?-when I am tempted to add one more accumulation to my life, when I am pulled toward one more centrifugal activity. One is free, like the hermit crab, to change one's shell. — 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

Cut asparagus at night - in desperation. When one is very tired one always does one more thing. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Woman must be the pioneer in this turning inward for strength. In a sense, she has always been the pioneer. — 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

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

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

Fame separates you from life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

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

Every step, even a tentative one, counts. — 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

Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day's last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star. Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

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

What a crippling art writing is, no body to it, no craft, really. It's all in the mind and you never see it or feel it
only sometimes hear it. It uses only such a small part of man. I wish I were a sculptor. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity. — 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

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I believe that true identity is found ... in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own. — 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

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

How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse. If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

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

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

All living relationships are in process of
change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms. But there is no single
fixed form to express such a changing relationship. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own. Here she will be able to refind her strength, the strength she needs to look and work at the second half of the problem - the neglected pure relationship. Only a refound person can refind a personal relationship. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Milky and opaque, it has the pinkish bloom of the sky on a summer evening, ripening to rain. — 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

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

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

Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood. — 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

The here, the now and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet and
from time immemorial
the woman. — 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

To mention a loved object, a person, or a place to someone else is to invest that object with reality. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There is no aristocracy of grief. Grief is a great leveler. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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?) — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me. — 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

The desire forcontinuity of being-loved-alone seems to me "the error bred in the bone" of man. For "there is no one-and-only, as a friend of mine once said in a similar discussion, "there are just one-and-only moments. — 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

Yesterday I sat in a field of violets for a long time perfectly still, until I really sank into it - into the rhythm of the place, I mean - then when I got up to go home I couldn't walk quickly or evenly because I was still in time with the field. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I walked far down the beach, soothed by the rhythm of the waves, the sun on my bare back and legs, the wind and mist from the spray on my hair. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. — 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

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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; — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

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

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. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

People "died" all the time ... Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out ... you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. — 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