Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.

The world has different owners at sunrise... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears.

God may want you to be the answer to your own prayer.

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time 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.

Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.

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

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.

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.

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

Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.

I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. 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. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints - to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.

Only when a tree has fallen can you take the measure of it. It is the same with a man.

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

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

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.

People "died" all the time. . . . Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out. . . you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feelings one can go through in one day.

Travel Far, Pay No Fare... a book can take you anywhere.

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.

My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once.

You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

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.