Quotes from Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Communication with another person -- wasn't it the realest thing in life?

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

Fame separates you from life.

For the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.

Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye.

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.

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.

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

Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.

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

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

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

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

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.

It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. 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.

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.

How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse. If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange.

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. It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself.

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

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.

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

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

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!