01c. 1953 ADit takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeded.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
02c. 1953 ADThe 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.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
03c. 1953 ADI do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
04c. 1953 ADParting 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.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
05c. 1953 ADIt 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.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
06c. 1953 ADI must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
07c. 1953 ADThe beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
08c. 1953 ADYou can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
10c. 1953 ADThe 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.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
11c. 1953 ADIt is the wilderness inthe mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. When one is astranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then onecannot touch others.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
12c. 1953 ADI 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.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
13c. 1953 ADAnd so I miss the fertilization that might come from a contact. And for me--yes, I think I might as well admit it--fertilization does come a great deal from contacts. Why then do I avoid them--in a sort of false pride--shyness--timorous modesty? I used to be afraid of falling in love with people--or having them think I was--that I was chasing them (how ridiculous--I am actually always running away!) but now surely--I should be mature enough to be over that. I am no longer afraid of falling in love, and the other false modesties should vanish. I cannot bear to think "par delicatesse j'ai perdu ma vie." (Because of discretion I have lost my life).Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
14c. 1953 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
15c. 1953 ADA good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partnersdo not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gayand swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s. To touch heavily would be to arrest the patternand freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no placehere for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Nowarm in arm, now face to face, now back to back—it does not matter which. Because they know theyare partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished byit.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
16c. 1953 ADAll living relationships are in process ofchange, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms. But there is no singlefixed form to express such a changing relationship.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
17c. 1953 ADNot 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.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
18c. 1953 ADYesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
19c. 1953 ADThere 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?Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
20c. 1953 ADThere is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
21c. 1953 ADOnly in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
22c. 1953 ADThere is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
23c. 1953 AD...I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central cor to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints -to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony...Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗
24c. 1953 ADA note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.Anne Morrow Lindbergh / quote ↗