Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.

Duration is not a test of true or false.

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt / A pain undiagnosable but felt.

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!

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

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too..

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

To mention a loved object, a person, or a place to someone else is to invest that object with reality.

Only with winter-patience can we bring / The deep-desired, long-awaited spring.

No new sect ever had humor; no disciples either, even the disciples of Christ.

There is no harvest for the heart alone; / The seed of love must be / Eternally / Resown.

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

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.

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 intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity.

To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone, his own burdens, his own way.

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

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.

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen --- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery --- just stark me.

The most exhausting thing you can do is to be inauthentic.

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

Marriage should, I think, always be a little hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.

Him that I love, I wish to be free—even from me.

Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

When one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others.

I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

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 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.

There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.