Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes - Page 7

No American can understand the need for time -- that is, simply space to breathe. If you have ten minutes to spare you should jam that full instead of leaving it -- as space around your next ten minutes. How can anything ripen without those 'empty' ten minutes?

Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds.

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.

It is the striving after perfection that makes one an artist. It is the sense that one is imperfect, unfulfilled, unfinished. One attempts by a superhuman effort to fill the gap, to leap over it, to finish it in another medium. And one creates a third and separate thing: 'Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America.

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion.

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there. Enjoy the moment, even if it means merely a walk in the country.

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

One can get just as much exultation in losing oneself in a little thing as in a big thing. It is nice to think how one can be recklessly lost in a daisy.

The plane seems exultant now, even arrogant. We did it, we did it! We're up, above you. We were dependant on you just now, prisoners fawning on you for favors, for wind and light. But now, we are free. We are up! We are off! Like someone singing ecstatically, climbing, soaring- a sustained note of power and joy.

I feel I should not be ... so at the mercy of people's regard. And yet - it is the artist's desire for communication too; without the answering voice you get so numb; you lose faith in your powers to communicate.

No new sect ever had humor; no disciples either, even the disciples of Christ.

What release to write so that one forgets oneself, forgets one's companion, forgets where one is or what one is going to do next to be drenched in sleep or in the sea. Pencils and pads and curling blue sheets alive with letters heap up on the desk.

Why do progress and beauty have to be so opposed?

To be deeply in love is, of course, a great liberating force.

Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.

the issue of war or peace is an issue that concerns not only experts on Foreign Affairs but every citizen of the United States.

There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?

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

... once you get beyond the crust of the first pang it is all the same and you can easily bear it. It is just the transition from painlessness to pain that is so terrible.

It is not restful, it is not possible to talk wholeheartedly to more than one person at a time. You can't really talk with a person unless you surrender to them, for the moment (all other talk is futile). You can't surrender to more than one person a moment.