Anne Spencer Lindbergh (née Morrow; June 22, 1906 – February 7, 2001) was an American author, aviator, and the wife of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh. She was an acclaimed author whose books and articles spanned the genres of poetry to non-fiction, touching upon topics as diverse as youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment, as well as the role of women in the 20th century. Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea is a popular inspirational book, reflecting on the lives of American women. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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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.
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.
By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves; that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships.
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.
For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
How hard it is to have the beautiful interdependence of marriage and yet be strong in oneself alone.
How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
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.
I feel we are all islands- in a common sea.
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.
It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.
Life is a gift, given in trust- like a child.
Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in 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.
Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
Only when a tree has fallen can you take a measure of it. It is the same with a man.
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.
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.
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 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.
The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.
There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.
To be deeply in love is, of course, a great liberating force.
To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.
Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. 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.
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.
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.
Categories: Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Quotes of the day
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