Anne morrow lindbergh quotes

One must lose one's life to find it.

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.

It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feelings one can go through in one day.

Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.

Failures aren't failures if you learn something from them.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in fact, hardly exists. It comes as a shock in life to learn that we usually only exchange one set of restrictions for another. The second set, however, is self-chosen, and therefore easier to accept.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

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

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

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.

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

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

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

Flowers always have it - poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection . . .

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.

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.

Perhaps both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit — qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected.

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom.

My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once.

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.

I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.

The ball of rumor and criticism, once it starts rolling, is difficult to stop.

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

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.

My Life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds.

When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation.

Great problems that face the world today in both the private and the public sphere cannot be solved by women – or by men – alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.

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

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

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.

I do not like talking casually to people - it does not interest me - and most of them are unwilling to talk at all seriously.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, 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.

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

To mention a loved object, a person, or a place to someone else is to invest that object with reality.

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.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

There is no harvest for the heart alone. The seed of love must be eternally re-sown.

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

People talk about love as if it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers.

I must try to be alone for part of each year...and part of each day...in order to keep my core, my center...Women must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities. She must be the pioneer of achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.

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.

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.

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

Flying was a very tangible freedom. In those days, it was beauty, adventure, discovery - the epitome of breaking into new worlds.

When you love someone you do not love them, all the time, in the exact same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.

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

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

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

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

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.

there is no aristocracy of grief. Grief is a great leveler.

I sometimes think that perhaps our minds are too weak to grasp joy or sorrow except in small things...In the big things joy and sorrow are just alike - overwhelming. At least, we only get them bit by bit, in tiny flashes - in waves - that our minds can't stand for very long. p 199

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 one connected to others. And for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through silence.

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.

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

The beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think.

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.

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.

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

We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen. Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio or televsion to fill up the void... We can do our housework with soap-opera heroes at our side... Now instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.

For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the serenity of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.

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

People "died" all the time. . . . Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out. . . you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead.

God often used bitter experiences to make us better. Gold can be a helpful servant, but a cruel master.

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.

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.

Marriage should, I think, always be a little bit hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.

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

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.

# "I saw the most beautiful cat today. It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied, so complacent.

The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.

I had the feeling . . . that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?)

This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.

The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

Certain springs are tapped only when you're alone.

I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it.

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

The most exhausting thing you can do is to be inauthentic.

To me there is something completely and satisfyingly restful in that stretch of sea and sand, sea and sand and sky - complete peace, complete fulfillment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The here, the now, and the individual, have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet, and - from time immemorial - the woman. In the small circle of the home she has never quite forgotten the particular uniqueness of each member of the family; the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here. This is the basic substance of life. These are the individual elements that form the bigger entities like mass, future, world. We may neglect these elements, but we cannot dispense with them. They are the drops that make up the stream. They are the essence of life itself.

When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music--then, and then only are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

...the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom. The only real security is... living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

Fame separates you from 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.

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

When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.

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

Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life.

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

I think best with a pencil in my hand.

Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.

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

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?

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.

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