Quotes by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.
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.
Life is a gift, given in trust - like a child.
To be deeply in love is, of course, a great liberating force.
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
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.
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.
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.
For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls - women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.
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.
How hard it is to have the beautiful interdependence of marriage and yet be strong in oneself alone.
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 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.
America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.
The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.
How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
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.
It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.
I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.
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.
Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.
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.
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