Anne Morrow Lindbergh > Quotes

“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, Gift from the Sea

“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.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“it takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeded.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide 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, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

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 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. Relationships 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, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.”
― 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, Gift from the Sea

“Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“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. ”
― 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

“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, Gift from the Sea

“One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“One can never pay in gratitude: one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life. ”
― 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, Gift from the Sea

“Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“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.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“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, Gift from the Sea

“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, War Within & Without: Diaries And Letters Of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939-1944

“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, Gift from the Sea

“I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.”
― 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, Gift from the Sea

“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, Gift from the Sea

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

“When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“My Life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds.”
― 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

“Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day- like writing a poem or saying a prayer.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“# "I saw the most beautiful cat today. It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied, so complacent.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928

“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, Gift from the Sea

“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

“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

“When you love someone you do not love them, all the time, in the exact same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Perhaps both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit--qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected. It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“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, Hour Of Gold, Hour Of Lead: Diaries And Letters Of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929-1932

“The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“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!”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“by and large,mothers and house wives are the only workers who do not have regular time off.They are the great vacationless class”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Great problems that face the world today in both the private and the public sphere cannot be solved by women – or by men – alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.”
― 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 (War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1939-1944)”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Wartime Writings 1939-1944

“There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient

“No man is an island,' said John Donne. I feel we are all islands -- in a common sea.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“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, Hour Of Gold, Hour Of Lead: Diaries And Letters Of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929-1932