Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.

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.

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

Only when a tree has fallen can you take the measure of it. It is the same with a man.

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

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.

For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.

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.

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.

... the most ordinary everyday living is as delicate, as breath-taking, as difficult, takes as terrific physical and mental control and effort, as walking a tightrope.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work. The curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.

I think best with a pencil in my hand.

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.

We must relearn to be alone.

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

Why do progress and beauty have to be so opposed?

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.

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.

The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it.

Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air.

Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.

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

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

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.

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. . . . She had not lost it. She was touching it with her fingertips. This was flying: to go swiftly over the earth you loved, touching it lightly with your fingertips, holding the railroads lines in your hand to guide you, like a skein of wool in a spider-web game - like following Ariadne's thread through the Minotaur's maze, Where would it lead, where?

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

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.

Certain springs are tapped only when you're alone.

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

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

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

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

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

We tend not to choose the unknown, which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. An yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.

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.

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

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.