Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

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.

It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.

One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief.

Love is a force.... It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces.

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

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

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.

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

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.

The world has been forced to its knees. Unhappily, we seldom find our way there without being beaten to it by suffering.

Life is a gift, given in trust - like a child.

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.

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.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

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.

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

Go with the pain, let it take you. Open your palms and your body to the pain. It comes in waves like the tide and you must be open as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up and then, retreating, leaving you empty and clear.

the issue of war or peace is an issue that concerns not only experts on Foreign Affairs but every citizen of the United States.

people talk about 'sex' as though it hopped about by itself, like a frog!

Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.

To be deeply in love is, of course, a great liberating force.

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.

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

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

No new sect ever had humor; no disciples either, even the disciples of Christ.

Guys kick friendship all over just like a soccer, nonetheless it does not appear to crack. Girls deal with it like glass and it goes to items.

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.

Splutter, splutter. Yes - we're off - we're rising. But why start off with an engine like that? But it smooths out now, like a long sigh, like a person breathing easily, freely. Like someone singing ecstatically, climbing, soaring - sustained note of power and joy. We turn from the lights of the city; we pivot on a dark wing; we roar over the earth. The plane seems exultant now, even arrogant. We did it, we did it!

Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.