Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

174 Sourced Quotes

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
War is a thug's game. The thug strikes first and harder. He doesn't go by rules and he isn't afraid of hurting people.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I should like to be a full-time Mother and a full-time Artist and a full-time Wife-Companion and also a 'Charming Woman' on the side! And to be aware and record it all. I cannot do it all. Something must go — several things probably. The 'charming woman' first!

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Woman must come of age by herself.... She must find her true center alone.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Here sits the Unicorn;
The wounds in his side
Still bleed

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Charles was a stubborn Swede, you know, and he himself never felt the need to explain his feelings about where he stood and about past statements. But I feel free now to elaborate on his actual attitudes. He never wanted to be regarded as a hero or leader, and he never had political ambitions. His prewar isolationist speeches were given in all sincerity for what he thought was the good of the country and the world... He was accused of being anti-Semetic, but in the 45 years I lived with him I never heard him make a remark against the Jews, not a crack or joke, and neither did any of our children.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Cut asparagus at night — in desperation. When one is very tired one always does one more thing.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Snow — real snow — soft and surprising, suddenly over the world. I never get over the surprise of snow. So gently changing the world. I must go out in it and see it. It is such a miracle — like conversion. Every neglected seed pod, every stray grapevine tendril, carries its burden of snow. Not one is forgotten. The change is complete. It makes me full of joy.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
No new sect ever had humor; no disciples either... it took age to ripen humor.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that — just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
What release to write so that one forgets oneself, forgets one's companion, forgets where one is or what one is going to do next — to be drenched in work as one is drenched in sleep or in the sea. Pencils and pads and curling blue sheets alive with letters heap up on the desk.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
It is not restful, it is not possible to talk wholeheartedly to more than one person at a time. You can't really talk with a person unless you surrender to them, for the moment (all other talk is futile). You can't surrender to more than one person a moment.

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

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it.

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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be "in grace" and other periods when they feel "out of grace," even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one's tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state one can hardly tie a shoe-string. It is true that a large part of life consists in learning a technique of tying the shoe-string, whether one is in grace or not. But there are techniques of living too; there are even techniques in the search for grace.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the air to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh