Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.Collection: Running
Geniuses were like storms or cyclones, pulling everything into their path, sticks and stones and dust.Collection: Dust
Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye.Collection: Eye
people talk about 'sex' as though it hopped about by itself, like a frog!Collection: Sex
I can conceive of 'falling in love' over and over again. But 'marriage,' this richness of life itself, I cannot conceive of having again - or with anyone else. In this sense 'marriage' seems to me indissoluble.Collection: Falling In Love
war is a thug's game. The thug strikes first and harder. He doesn't go by rules and he isn't afraid of hurting people.Collection: Hurt
When one is a stranger to oneself, then one is estranged from others, too.Collection: Self Esteem
For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.Collection: Space
For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as wellCollection: Important
... writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.Collection: Writing
Guys kick friendship all over just like a soccer, nonetheless it does not appear to crack. Girls deal with it like glass and it goes to items.Collection: Girl
And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down on the still world below the choppy waves - it will always remain magic.Collection: Eye
Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.Collection: Truth
It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
It was a magic caused by the collision of modern methods and old ones; modern history and ancient; accessibility and isolation. And it was a magic which could only strike spark about that time. A few years earlier, from the point of view of aircraft alone, it would have been impossible to reach these places; a few later, and there will be no such isolation.Collection: Views
These bright roofs, these steep towers, these jewel-lakes, these skeins of railroad line - all spoke to her and she answered. She was glad they were there. She belonged to them and they to her.Collection: Lakes
Splutter, splutter. Yes - we're off - we're rising. But why start off with an engine like that? But it smooths out now, like a long sigh, like a person breathing easily, freely. Like someone singing ecstatically, climbing, soaring - sustained note of power and joy. We turn from the lights of the city; we pivot on a dark wing; we roar over the earth. The plane seems exultant now, even arrogant. We did it, we did it!Collection: Dark
Woman must be the pioneer in this turning inward for strength. In a sense, she has always been the pioneer.Collection: Inspirational
... the most ordinary everyday living is as delicate, as breath-taking, as difficult, takes as terrific physical and mental control and effort, as walking a tightrope.Collection: Effort
The fundamental magic of flying, a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes - purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience - and will not change as they change.Collection: Miracle
The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.Collection: Pain
Perhaps both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit — qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected.Collection: Heart
I had the feeling . . . that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?)Collection: People
Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air.Collection: Air
The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.Collection: Heart
Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in fact, hardly exists. It comes as a shock in life to learn that we usually only exchange one set of restrictions for another. The second set, however, is self-chosen, and therefore easier to accept.Collection: Life
Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people - It just isn't living at all.Collection: People
It's funny how you can be mad at someone one moment and want to hug them the next.Collection: Mad At Someone
It is nice to think how one can be recklessly lost in a daisy!Collection: Nice
My diaries were written primarily, I think, not to preserve the experience but to savor it, to make it even more real, more visible and palpable, than in actual life. For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.Collection: Real
One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief.Collection: Grief
Failures aren't failures if you learn something from them.Collection: Failure
Go for a short walk in a soft rain - lovely - so many wild flowers startling me through the woods and a lawn sprinkled with dandelions, like a night with stars. And through it all the sound of soft rain like the sound of innumerable earthworms stirring in the ground.Collection: Stars
...the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom. The only real security is... living in the present and accepting it as it is now.Collection: Love
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. Only when one is connected to one's own core, is one connected to others. And for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through silence.Collection: Spring
The world has been forced to its knees. Unhappily, we seldom find our way there without being beaten to it by suffering.Collection: Suffering
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.Collection: Courage
I sometimes think that perhaps our minds are too weak to grasp joy or sorrow except in small things...In the big things joy and sorrow are just alike - overwhelming. At least, we only get them bit by bit, in tiny flashes - in waves - that our minds can't stand for very long. p 199Collection: Thinking
One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth.Collection: Miracle
This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.Collection: Stars
To mention a loved object, a person, or a place to someone else is to invest that object with reality.Collection: Reality
We insist on permanency, on continuity, when the only continuity possible is in growth, in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass but partners in the same pattern. The only real security in a relationship lies neither in looking back in nostalgia, nor forward with dread or anticipation, but living in the present and accepting the relationship as it is now.Collection: Real
Yesterday I sat in a field of violets for a long time perfectly still, until I really sank into it - into the rhythm of the place, I mean - then when I got up to go home I couldn't walk quickly or evenly because I was still in time with the field.Collection: Home
The here, the now, and the individual, have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet, and - from time immemorial - the woman. In the small circle of the home she has never quite forgotten the particular uniqueness of each member of the family; the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here. This is the basic substance of life. These are the individual elements that form the bigger entities like mass, future, world. We may neglect these elements, but we cannot dispense with them. They are the drops that make up the stream. They are the essence of life itself.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Circles
Marriage should, I think, always be a little bit hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Marriage
# "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.Collection: Beautiful