Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.Collection: Beautiful
Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work. The curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.Collection: Hands
I think best with a pencil in my hand.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Friendship
the final lesson of learning to be independent - widowhood ... is the hardest lesson of all.Collection: Independent
There is no harvest for the heart alone. The seed of love must be eternally re-sown.Collection: Love
People talk about love as if it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers.Collection: Love
Flowers always have it - poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection . . .Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Stress
Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Men
God often used bitter experiences to make us better. Gold can be a helpful servant, but a cruel master.Collection: Gold
I believe that true identity is found . . . in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.Collection: Believe
Love is a force.... It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces.Collection: Love Is
Love is a force. . . . It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product. It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.Collection: Love
Flying was a very tangible freedom. In those days, it was beauty, adventure, discovery - the epitome of breaking into new worlds.Collection: Adventure
... 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.Collection: Pain
How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse. If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange.Collection: Shopping
Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt A pain undiagnosable but felt.Collection: Pain
Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly.Collection: Children
My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.Collection: Photography
What a crippling art writing is, no body to it, no craft, really. It's all in the mind and you never see it or feel it -- only sometimes hear it. It uses only such a small part of man. I wish I were a sculptor.Collection: Art
People don't want to be understood - I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left. They don't want complete sympathy or complete understanding. They want to be treated carelessly and taken for granted lots of times.Collection: Taken
Certain environments, certain modes of life, and certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification is one of them.Collection: Simplicity
I think one must do the thing -- whatever it is (and it changes from time to time) -- that unites you to the flowing stream of the world. At any price, one must do it first. Otherwise one can do nothing, nothing at all. One is out of touch, out of grace.Collection: Thinking
People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that -- just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden.Collection: Strong
For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life.Collection: Growth
Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye. If one is recognized everywhere, one begins to feel like Medusa. People stop their normal life and actions and freeze into staring manikins. "We can never catch people or life unawares," as I wrote to my mother, in an outburst of frustration. "It is always looking at us."Collection: Mother
I am beginning to respect the apathetic days. Perhaps they're a necessary pause: better to give in to them than to fight them at your desk hopelessly; then you lose both the day and your self-respect. Treat them as physical phenomena -- casually -- and obey them.Collection: Fighting
We must relearn to be alone.Collection: Loneliness
I want to be pure in heart -- but I like to wear my purple dress.Collection: Heart
Who is not afraid of pure space - that breathtaking empty space of an open door?Collection: Doors
But I want first of all- in fact, as an end to these other desires- to be at peace with myself.Collection: Peace
I find the weight of air/Almost too great to bear.Collection: Grief
I should like to be a full-time Mother and a full-time Artist and a full-time Wife-Companion and also a 'Charming Woman' on the side! And to be aware and record it all. I cannot do it all. Something must go - several things probably. The 'charming woman' first!Collection: Mother
For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.Collection: Diaries
... not only is life put in new patterns from the air, but it is somehow arrested, frozen into form. (The leaping hare is caught in a marble panel.) A glaze is put over life. There is no flaw, no crack in the surface; a still reservoir, no ripple on its face. Looking down from the air that morning, I felt that stillness rested like a light over the earth. The waterfalls seemed frozen solid; the tops of the trees were still; the river hardly stirred, a serpent gently moving under its shimmering skin.Collection: Morning
there is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.Collection: Change
Fame separates you from life.Collection: Fame
Only when a tree has fallen can you take the measure of it. It is the same with a man.Collection: Death
To me there is something completely and satisfyingly restful in that stretch of sea and sand, sea and sand and sky - complete peace, complete fulfillment.Collection: Peace
Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Inspirational
We tend not to choose the unknown, which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. An yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.Collection: Happiness
We are always bargaining with our feelings so that we can live from day to day.Collection: Feelings
Certain springs are tapped only when you're alone.Collection: Love
I do not like talking casually to people - it does not interest me - and most of them are unwilling to talk at all seriously.Collection: Talking
When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music--then, and then only are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.Collection: Love
Why is life speeded up so? Why are things so terribly, unbearably precious that you can't enjoy them but can only wait breathless in dread of their going?Collection: Life