Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

174 Sourced Quotes

I think one must do the thing — whatever it is (and it changes from time to time) — that unites you to the flowing stream of the world. At any price, one must do it first. Otherwise one can do nothing, nothing at all. One is out of touch, out of grace.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
People don't want to be understood — I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left. They don't want complete sympathy or complete understanding. They want to be treated carelessly and taken for granted lots of times.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Charles is life itself — pure life, force, like sunlight — and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him — caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in.

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

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us — invisibly.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
One can get just as much exultation in losing oneself in a little thing as in a big thing. It is nice to think how one can be recklessly lost in a daisy!

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I feel I should not be... so at the mercy of people's regard. And yet — it is the artist's desire for communication too; without the answering voice you get so numb; you lose faith in your powers to communicate.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Life itself is always pulling you away from the understanding of life.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
One writes not to be read but to breathe — I did even then. One writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes — in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to analyze and disperse one's gloom.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
We walk up the beach under the stars. And when we are tired of walking, we lie flat on the sand under a bowl of stars. We feel stretched, expanded to take in their compass. They pour into us until we are filled with stars, up to the brim.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I... understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions.... Woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Once you get beyond the crust of the first pang it is all the same and you can easily bear it. It is just the transition from painlessness to pain that is so terrible.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I can conceive of 'falling in love' over and over again. But 'marriage,' this richness of life itself, I cannot conceive of having again — or with anyone else. In this sense 'marriage' seems to me indissoluble.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Here sits the Unicorn
In captivity;
His bright invulnerability
Captive at last

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
He could leap the corral,
If he rose
To his full height;
He could splinter the fencing light,
With three blows
Of his porcelain hoofs in flight —
If he chose.
He could shatter his prison wall,
Could escape them all —
If he rose,
If he chose.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh