Quotes from Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment.

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greed, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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.

Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century.

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women.

Solitude, says the moon shell. Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.

One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day's last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star. Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words.

But I want first of all—in fact, as an end to these other desires—to be at peace with myself

Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own. Here she will be able to refind her strength, the strength she needs to look and work at the second half of the problem - the neglected pure relationship. Only a refound person can refind a personal relationship.

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

The problem is not entirely in finding a room of one's own, the time alone, difficult and necessary as that is. The problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities. In fact, the problem is how to feed the soul.

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has the give - like milk in the breast.

Growth in awareness has always been painful [...] But it does lead to greater independence and, eventually, cooperation in action. For the enormous problems that face the world today, in both the private and public sphere, cannot be solved by women - and men - alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.

Is it not rather ugly, one may ask? One collects material possessions not only for security, comfort or vanity, but for beauty as well. Is your sea-shell house not ugly and bare? No, it is beautiful, my house. It is bare, of course, but the wind, the sun, the smell of the pines blow through its bareness. The unfinished beams in the roof are veiled by cobwebs. They are lovely, I think, gazing up at them with new eyes;

seems to me the most beautiful thing on earth, perhaps because it is unearthly, and the touch of God in us: the miracle of mercy, the unexpected, the arms of the prodigal son's father, the ravens bringing food in the night, the cup running over.

One learns first of all in beach living the art of sheding;how little one can get along with, not how much....To say-is it necessary?-when I am tempted to add one more accumulation to my life, when I am pulled toward one more centrifugal activity. One is free, like the hermit crab, to change one's shell.

A day out of season, stopping the monotonous count of summer days. Stopping, too, one's own summer routine, so that, looking out on the gray skies, one says not only, 'What time of year is it?' but, 'What time of life am I in? Where am I? What am I doing?

We all wish to be loved alone.

The good past is so far away and the near past is so horrible and the future is so perilous, that the present has a chance to expand into a golden eternity of here and now.

Modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. [...] Our grandmothers, and even - with some scrambling - our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.

Woman's life today is tending more and more toward ... 'Zerrissenheit'--torn to pieces-hood. She cannot live perpetually in 'Zerrissenheit.' She will be shattered into a thousand pieces.

I felt a kind of impersonal kinship with them and a joy in that kinship. Beauty of earth and sea and air meant more to me. I was in harmony with it, melted into the universe, lost in it, as one is lost in a canticle of praise, swelling from an unknown crowd in a cathedral. 'Praise ye the Lord, all ye fishes of the sea – all ye birds of the air – all ye children of men – Praise ye the Lord!' Yes, I felt closer to my fellow men too, even in my solitude.