Talk:Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced or inadequately sourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Anne Morrow Lindbergh. --Antiquary 18:12, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

• A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

• A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

• 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.

• 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.

• Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day — like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

• Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone.

• Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.
  • Variant: Duration is not a test of true or false.

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

• For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

• Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

• Him that I love, I wish to be free — even from me.

• I believe that what women resent is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

• I feel we are all islands — in a common sea.

• I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

• If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

• It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.
  • Most uses of this quote are unsourced. In Cynthia Heald's Uncommon Beauty (2007) on p. 154, she quotes it and cites Bob Kelly's Worth Repeating (2003) as the source in a footnote. I was unable to find a searchable copy of the latter although, given the dates involved, I suspect it wouldn't lead anywhere worthwhile. --Hughh (talk) 01:45, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

• Life is a gift, given in trust — like a child.

• Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse.

• Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

• My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen — no retouching, no shadows, no flattery — just stark me.

• Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

• Only with winter-patience can we bring The deep-desired, long-awaited spring.

• Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.

• Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

• Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

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

• 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.

• The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness.

• The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

• There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

• To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission.

• To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.

• What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it — like a secret vice.