Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

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.

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

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.

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'.

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

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.

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life.

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.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

When one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others.

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

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!

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.

When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race.

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.

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

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

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.

I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.

A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

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.

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.

When one is a stranger to oneself, then one is estranged from others, too.

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.

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