Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

174 Sourced Quotes

I do not like talking casually to people — it does not interest me — and most of them are unwilling to talk at all seriously.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The world today does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone. How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Forgotten the strife;
Now the need to kill
Has died like fire,
And the need to love
Has replaced desire

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
When you love someone you do not love them, all the time, in the exact same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
People talk about 'sex' as though it hopped about by itself, like a frog!

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
At night I write letters in front of the fire while C. works at the card table on his Spirit of St. Louis. He says writing 'takes the place of sociability.' It is your form of giving to friends — one eliminates the other. I am always trying to do both.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Intermittency — an impossible lesson for human beings to learn. How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one's existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave?... Perhaps this is the most important thing.... Simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of relationship is valid.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I must try to be alone for part of each year...and part of each day...in order to keep my core, my center...Women must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities. She must be the pioneer of achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete. They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole — perfect. Is that then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally in moments like that? But flowers always have it — poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I only occasionally, like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The plane seems exultant now, even arrogant. We did it, we did it! We're up, above you. We were dependant on you just now, prisoners fawning on you for favors, for wind and light. But now, we are free. We are up! We are off! Like someone singing ecstatically, climbing, soaring- a sustained note of power and joy.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I believe that true identity is found... in creative activity springing from within. It is found when one loses oneself.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I had not thought at the time of publishing it. But now that it is written I would rather like to have it published. Until a book is published one learns nothing from it, one does not grow beyond it, one cannot get on the next step.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone, his own burden, his own way.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Why is it harder to think of his going to nothing than to think of his coming from nothing? One direction is just as dark as the other.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The final lesson of learning to be independent — widowhood... is the hardest lesson of all.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Love is a force. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces. It is a power, like money or steam or electricity.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present?

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Here sits the Unicorn;
Leashed by a chain of gold
To the pomengranate tree.
So light a chain to hold
So fierce a beast;
Delicate as a cross at rest
On a maiden's breast.
He could snap the golden chain
With one toss of his mane,
If he chose to move,
If he chose to prove
His liberty.
But he does not choose
What choice would lose.
He stays, the Unicorn,
In captivity.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The most ordinary everyday living is as delicate, as breath-taking, as difficult, takes as terrific physical and mental control and effort, as walking a tightrope.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people — It just isn't living at all.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Flying was a very tangible freedom. In those days, it was beauty, adventure, discovery - the epitome of breaking into new worlds.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh