Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes - Page 4

We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action, and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, over-reaching and over-straining ourselves in the unnatural effort. ... In our breathless attempts we often miss the flowering that waits for afternoon.

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 punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Certain springs are tapped only when you're alone.

I do not like talking casually to people - it does not interest me - and most of them are unwilling to talk at all seriously.

I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work. The curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.

# "I saw the most beautiful cat today. It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied, so complacent.

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.

the final lesson of learning to be independent - widowhood ... is the hardest lesson of all.

Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of 'coming of age'-to learn how to stand alone. She must learn not to depend on another, nor to feel she must prove her strength by competing with another. In the past, she has swung between these two opposite poles of dependence and competition, of Victorianism and Feminism. Both extremes throw her off balance; neither is the center, the true center of being a whole woman. She must find her true center alone. She must become whole.

The beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think.

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

There is no harvest for the heart alone. The seed of love must be eternally re-sown.

I think best with a pencil in my hand.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

People talk about love as if it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers.

In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.

Flowers always have it - poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection . . .

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?

Great problems that face the world today in both the private and the public sphere cannot be solved by women – or by men – alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.

God often used bitter experiences to make us better. Gold can be a helpful servant, but a cruel master.

Love is a force.... It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces.

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.