Quotes From "Gift From The Sea" By Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I 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

It 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

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

A 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

All 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

Woman must come of age by herself -- she must find her true center alone. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If one sets aside timefor 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. What a commentary on our civilization, when beingalone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that onepractices it–like a secret vice! . Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We walk up the beach under the stars. We feel stretched, expanded to take in their compass. They pour into us until we are filled with stars, up to the brim. This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy–even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations.. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense–no–but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after. Anne Morrow Lindbergh