Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

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.

Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.

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?

the final lesson of learning to be independent - widowhood ... is the hardest lesson of all.

Fame separates you from life.

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 core 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.

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.

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.

Frenchwomen just never look ungroomed, do they?

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion.

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.

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

No one, it has been said, will ever look at the Moon in the same way again. More significantly can one say that no one will ever look at the earth in the same way. Man had to free himself from earth to perceive both its diminutive place in a solar system and its inestimable value as a life -fostering planet. As earthmen, we may have taken another step into adulthood. We can see our planet earth with detachment, with tenderness, with some shame and pity, but at last also with love.

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?

It is nice to think how one can be recklessly lost in a daisy!

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

The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

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

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.

... not only is life put in new patterns from the air, but it is somehow arrested, frozen into form. (The leaping hare is caught in a marble panel.) A glaze is put over life. There is no flaw, no crack in the surface; a still reservoir, no ripple on its face. Looking down from the air that morning, I felt that stillness rested like a light over the earth. The waterfalls seemed frozen solid; the tops of the trees were still; the river hardly stirred, a serpent gently moving under its shimmering skin.

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

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.

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!

The nicest gifts are those left, nameless and quiet, unburdened with love, or vanity, or the desire for attention.

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

One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much.

life itself is always pulling you away from the understanding of life.

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.

What release to write so that one forgets oneself, forgets one's companion, forgets where one is or what one is going to do next to be drenched in sleep or in the sea. Pencils and pads and curling blue sheets alive with letters heap up on the desk.

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

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.

Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people - It just isn't living at all.

It is not restful, it is not possible to talk wholeheartedly to more than one person at a time. You can't really talk with a person unless you surrender to them, for the moment (all other talk is futile). You can't surrender to more than one person a moment.

Travel Far, Pay No Fare... a book can take you anywhere.

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.

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. Only when one is connected to one's own core is.

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.

Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.

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.

God may want you to be the answer to your own prayer.

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

Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Packing is chiefly planning -- if it is

In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of 'coming of age'-to learn how to stand alone. She must learn not to depend on another, nor to feel she must prove her strength by competing with another. In the past, she has swung between these two opposite poles of dependence and competition, of Victorianism and Feminism. Both extremes throw her off balance; neither is the center, the true center of being a whole woman. She must find her true center alone. She must become whole.

And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life.

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