Anne Morrow Lindbergh - Gift from the Sea (1955)

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Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's tides of all yesterday's scribblings.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily — like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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