Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can.

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom.

Only when a tree has fallen can you take the measure of it. It is the same with a man.

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

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

Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.

It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.

Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.

Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.

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.

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.

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.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

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

Love is a force.... It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces.

People talk about love as if it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers.

One must lose one's life to find it.

If it is a woman's function to give, she must be replenished, too.

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.