Quotes from Anne Morrow Lindbergh

No man is an island," said John Donne. I feel we are all islands—in a common sea.

what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

The acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.

am talking about the freedom that comes from choosing to remain open, as my mother did, to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

We must re-learn to be alone.

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

The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life. How long she will hold this enviable and precarious position no one knows. But her particular situation has a significance far above its apparent economic, national or even sex limitations.

The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes.

This beautiful image is to my mind the one that women could hold before their eyes. This is an end toward which we could strive - to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations and activities.

I don't worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride.

This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.

For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel.

How hard it is to have the beautiful interdependence of marriage and yet be strong in oneself alone.

One longs to explain, to be sure they understand, the people one loves.

We have had three appalling weeks, the kind one hardly believes while one is going through it. And afterwards, as now, it seems quite unbelievable—except for the inexplicable weariness. Written down it sounds merely funny.

BUT SURELY WE do demand duration and continuity of relationships

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

The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our heart can hold. Or rather, for I believe the heart is infinite, modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry.

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.

But it is the marriage relationship in which the changing pattern is shown up most clearly because it is the deepest one and the most arduous to maintain; and because, somehow, we mistakenly feel that failure to maintain its exact original pattern is tragedy.

I mean to live a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily - like a hermit crab.