Top 226 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Morrow Lindbergh - Page 2

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

One must lose one's life to find it.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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