Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

It's as if you've been walking against a great wind all your life, and then the wind is gone, and you can't walk.

When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.

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

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach.

One can never pay in gratitude: one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other (one perfect sunrise gazing at another!) but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Every step, even a tentative one, counts.

The problem is not entirely in finding a room of one's own, the time alone, difficult and necessary as that is. The problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities. In fact, the problem is how to feed the soul.

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.

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.

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

When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even 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. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom

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.