Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

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.

Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full.

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

Don't wish me happiness
I don't expect to be happy all the time...
It's gotton beyond that somehow.
Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor.
I will need them all.

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

There are certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.

It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

I feel we are all islands-in a common sea. We are all, in the last analysis, alone. 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.

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.

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.

Every step, even a tentative one, counts.

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.

The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves: that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships. She must find that inner stillness which Charles Morgan describes as 'the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.'
This beautiful image is to my mind the one that women could hold before their eyes. This is an end toward which we could strive — to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations, and activities. Solitude alone is not the answer to this; it is only a step toward it, a mechanical aid, like the 'room of one's own' demanded for women, before they could make their place in the world. 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.

seems to me the most beautiful thing on earth, perhaps because it is unearthly, and the touch of God in us: the miracle of mercy, the unexpected, the arms of the prodigal son’s father, the ravens bringing food in the night, the cup running over.