Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

We have had three appalling weeks, the kind one hardly believes while one is going through it. And afterwards, as now, it seems quite unbelievable — except for the inexplicable weariness. Written down it sounds merely funny.

Woman's life today is tending more and more toward ... 'Zerrissenheit' — torn to pieces-hood. She cannot live perpetually in 'Zerrissenheit.' She will be shattered into a thousand pieces.

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.

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

Here sits the Unicorn
In captivity,
Yet free.

No man is an island,' said John Donne. I feel we are all islands — in a common sea.

It is hard to recognize, or even to describe, but I think this freedom is the real reason the book continues to be so well loved and so well read after all these years. I am talking about the freedom that comes from choosing to remain open, as my mother did, to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change.

What has made the day so perfect ? To begin with , it is a pattern of freedom. It’s setting has not been cramped in space or time. An island, curiously enough, gives a limitless feeling or both. Nor has the day been limited in kinds of activity. It has a natural balance of physical, intellectual and social life. It has an easy unforced rhythm. Work is not deformed by pressure. Relationship is not strangled by claims. Intimacy is tempered by lightness of touch. We have moved through our day like dancers not needing to touch more than lightly because we were instinctively moving to the same rhythm.

Tragedy is the common lot of man. 'So many people have lost children' I remind myself. pp 178-179
This tragedy is such an inextricable part of my story that it cannot be left out of an honest record. Suffering - no matter how multiplied - is always individual. p 179

379I believe that what a woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly. What we fear is not so much that our energy may be leaking away through small outlets as that it may be going 'down the drain.

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.

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured.

I walked far down the beach, soothed by the rhythm of the waves, the sun on my bare back and legs, the wind and mist from the spray on my hair.

"Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of "coming of age" -to learn how to stand alone."

The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.