Top 200 Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

152. “Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

153. “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. It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

154. “One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

155. “One comes in the end to realize that there is no permanent pure-relationship and there should not be. It is not even something to be desired. The pure relationship is limited, in space and in time. In its essence it implies exclusion. It excludes the rest of life, other relationships, other sides of personality, other responsibilities, other possibilities in the future. It excludes growth.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

156. “Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

157. “I walked far down the beach, soothed by the rhythm of the waves, the sun on my bare back and legs, the wind and mist from the spray on my hair.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

158. “Cut asparagus at night – in desperation. When one is very tired one always does one more thing.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

159. “If it is a woman’s function to give, she must be replenished, too.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

160. “Geniuses were like storms or cyclones, pulling everything into their path, sticks and stones and dust.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

162. “Woman must come of age by herself – she must find her true center alone.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

164. “The nicest gifts are those left, nameless and quiet, unburdened with love, or vanity, or the desire for attention.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

166. “We are always bargaining with our feelings so that we can live from day to day.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

167. “Fame separates you from life.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

168. “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.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

169. “Communication with another person – wasn’t it the realest thing in life?”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

170. “One longs to explain, to be sure they understand, the people one loves.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

171. “I felt a kind of impersonal kinship with them and a joy in that kinship. Beauty of earth and sea and air meant more to me. I was in harmony with it, melted into the universe, lost in it, as one is lost in a canticle of praise, swelling from an unknown crowd in a cathedral. ‘Praise ye the Lord, all ye fishes of the sea – all ye birds of the air – all ye children of men – Praise ye the Lord!’ Yes, I felt closer to my fellow men too, even in my solitude.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

172. “For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

173. “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.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

174. “It’s funny how you can be mad at someone one moment and want to hug them the next.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

175. “Woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

176. “Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you’re content to do it very very slowly.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

177. “How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

178. “I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in America than anywhere else 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.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

179. “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.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

180. “Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

181. “This beautiful image is to my mind the one that women could hold before their eyes. This is an end toward which we could strive – to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations and activities.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

182. “I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

183. “To ask how little, not how much, can I get along with. To say – is it necessary? – when I am tempted to add one more accumulation to my life, when I am pulled toward one more centrifugal activity.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

184. “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 work as one is drenched in sleep or the sea.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

185. “At whatever point one opens Gift from the Sea, to any chapter or page, the author’s words offer a chance to breathe and to live more slowly. The book makes it possible to quiet down and rest in the present, no matter what the circumstances may be. Just to read it – a little of it or in its entirety – is to exist for a while in a different and more peaceful tempo. Even the sway and flow of language and cadence seem to me to make reference to the easy, inevitable movements of the sea.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

186. “We all wish to be loved alone.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

187. “Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day’s last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star. Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

188. “The problem is not entirely in finding a room of one’s own, the time alone, difficult and necessary as that is. The problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities. In fact, the problem is how to feed the soul.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

189. “Both halves of this delicate bivalve are exactly matched. Each side, like the wing of a butterfly, is marked with the.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

190. “We have had three appalling weeks, the kind one hardly believes while one is going through it. And afterwards, as now, it seems quite unbelievable – except for the inexplicable weariness. Written down it sounds merely funny.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

191. “BUT SURELY WE do demand duration and continuity of relationships.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

192. “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.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

193. “I begin to shed my Martha-like anxiety about many things. Washable slipcovers, faded and old – I hardly see them; I don’t worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

194. “With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

195. “Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass. Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

196. “I don’t worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

197. “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. The more one gives, the more one has the give – like milk in the breast.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

198. “The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider’s web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

199. “One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

200. “The good past is so far away and the near past is so horrible and the future is so perilous, that the present has a chance to expand into a golden eternity of here and now.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh