A quiet yet spirited woman
 

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Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The Wikipedia's entry on "Anne Morrow Lindbergh" starts off as follow:

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (22 June 1906 - 7 February 2001)
Author and pioneering American aviator; wife of Charles Lindbergh


Anne Morrow Lindbergh first won literary acclaim when she was very young. At her graduation from Smith College, she won the Mary Augusta Jordan Prize for the most original literary piece and the Elizabeth Montagu Prize for the best essay on women of the 18th Century. The novels, essays and diaries she later composed have been described as "small works of art."
      -- About.com: Women's History

Much time during the early years of the Anne Morrow Lindbergh's marriage to Charles Lindbergh was spent flying. Anne took to flying with ease, and soon became her husband's trusted co-pilot on history-making journeys that took them all over the world. In 1931 they journeyed in a single-engine plane over Canada and Alaska, and on to Japan and China. The flight was the inspiration for Morrow Lindbergh's first book, "North to the Orient." She went on to write more than a dozen others. Her most controversial published work was her 1940 book "The Wave of the Future," in which she appeared to share her husband's favorable opinions regarding Nazi Germany. Speaking of the book in a 1973 television interview, Morrow Lindbergh admitted, "It was a mistake... It didn't help anybody... I didn't have the right to write it. I didn't know enough."
      -- PBS



The simple facts of Anne Lindbergh's life are that she married Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, a feat that briefly made him the world's most famous man; and that she endured what was called the "crime of the century" when their first child was kidnapped and found murdered. But Anne, far from being a simple soul, was interestingly complicated. Her husband was the simple one, a man happy mainly with machines.
      -- The Economist (Feb 15, 2001)

She gained global attention by marrying famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, on May 27, 1929, and by the kidnapping and murder of their first born son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh III in 1932. In 1929, she flew her first solo, and in 1930 was the first American woman to earn a glider pilot's license. She and her husband explored and charted air-routes between continents in the 1930s. Charles Lindbergh was the first pilot to fly non-stop transatlantic from New York City to Paris, in 1927. Together, they were the first to fly from Africa to South America, and explored polar air routes from North America to Asia and Europe.
      She wrote many books, such as Gift from the Sea in 1955, and many based on her expereinces and diaries as an aviator, a mother and a wife.
      -- Black Science Forum (BSF)

a1.jpg

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A gifted and insightful writer, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born in 1906 in New Jersey, the daughter of U.S. Senator Dwight Morrow and poet and women's education advocate Elizabeth Cutter Morrow. She married Charles Lindbergh in 1929, and began a life of flying. Ms. Lindbergh was the first licensed woman glider pilot in the United States. She was awarded many honoraria, including the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Gold Medal.
      -- SpiritSite.com










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Quotes

The following quotes are taken from Wikipedia, but arranged in the order of importance to me:



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





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





"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."





"The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. ["The most exhausting thing in life is insincerity."]





"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."





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





"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."





"It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded."





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





"Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood."
["Duration is not a test of true or false."]






"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."





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





"Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone."





"What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect ..."





"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.





"We must relearn to be alone."

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





"When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. "

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





"Good communication is stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after."

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





"I wonder why I bother to tell the truth when people ask me what I think of this and that and how I feel about this and that. I get so complicated and introspective that people often don't understand and are frankly puzzled and (naturally enough) bored. So why bother! It would be so much easier to say what they expected you to, and everything would be easy and pleasant."

-- Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





"People don't want to be understood — I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left."

-- Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





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

-- Locked Rooms and Open Doors (1974)





"I want to write — I want to write — I want to write and never never never will. I know it and I am so unhappy and it seems as though nothing else mattered. Whatever I'm doing, it's always there, an ultimate longing there saying, "Write this — write that — write —" and I can't. Lack ability, time, strength, and duration of vision. I wish someone would tell me brutally, "You can never write anything. Take up home gardening!""

-- Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





"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."





"I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be "in grace" and other periods when they feel "out of grace," even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one's tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state one can hardly tie a shoe-string. It is true that a large part of life consists in learning a technique of tying the shoe-string, whether one is in grace or not. But there are techniques of living too; there are even techniques in the search for grace."

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





"It doesn't matter that it can't last, that we don't find it more often. To know that there is such perfection, that there has been such perfection — it is worth living for. It exists. It has been — it is. One can contemplate it and feel complete peace."

-- Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





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

-- The Wave of the Future (1940)





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





"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."





"I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete.They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole — perfect. Is that then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally in moments like that? But flowers always have it — poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I only occasionally, like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding."

-- Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





"I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them."

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





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





"The shape of my life today starts with a family. I have a husband, five children and a home just beyond the suburbs of New York. I have also a craft, writing, and therefore work I want to pursue. The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many other things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.
    "But 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 core 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 languages 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. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from Phaedrus when he said, "May the outward and the inward man be at one." I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual gracefrom which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God."

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





"I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily — like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications."

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





"I have come to believe that you can get along without anyone — that is, without the close contact of any one person. That is a terrible shock to me, but I think it is true. You do need companionship, but wherever you go, in whatever new environment, you will find people who, to a large degree, take the place of those you left ... The intimate companionship goes, I think, when you leave a friend, but friendship stays. It is an inherent possibility of relationship once admitted — well, there it is."

-- Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





"Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages."

-- War Within and Without (1980)





"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 sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith."

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





"Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's tides of all yesterday's scribblings."

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





"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. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth."

-- Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929-1932 (1973), p. 3





"One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life."

-- North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 19





"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."





"There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas."

-- North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 1





"We were high above fields, and there far, far below, was a small shadow as of a great bird tearing along the neatly marked off fields. It gave me the most tremendous shock to realize for the first time the terrific speed we were going at and that that shadow meant us — us, like a mirror! That "bird" — it was us."

-- On her first flight, in Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





"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."





"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."





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





"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."





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

-- Gift from the Sea (1955)





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

-- Diary entry on the first anniversary of the kidnapping and death of her son Charles Augustus Lindbergh III (1 March 1932); later published in Locked Rooms and Open Doors (1974)





"Don't wish me happiness — I don't expect to be happy; it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor — I will need them all."

-- Letter to Corliss Lamont on her engagement to Charles Lindbergh (1928), in Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





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





"Dearly beloved — late again!"

-- Dearly Beloved (1962) First lines





"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."





"When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour …. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race."

-- Dearly Beloved (1962)





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





"Charles was a stubborn Swede, you know, and he himself never felt the need to explain his feelings about where he stood and about past statements. But I feel free now to elaborate on his actual attitudes. He never wanted to be regarded as a hero or leader, and he never had political ambitions. His prewar isolationist speeches were given in all sincerity for what he thought was the good of the country and the world... He was accused of being anti-Semetic, but in the 45 years I lived with him I never heard him make a remark against the Jews, not a crack or joke, and neither did any of our children."

-- On her husband, Charles Lindbergh, in The New York Times (20 April 1980)





"I saw standing against the great stone pillar — on more red plush — a tall, slim boy in evening dress — so much slimmer, so much taller, so much more poised than I expected. A very refined face, not at all like those grinning 'Lindy' pictures — a firm mouth, clear, straight blue eyes, fair hair, and nice color. Then I went down the line very confused and overwhelmed by it all. He did not smile — just bowed and shook hands."

-- On first meeting Charles Lindbergh, in Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





"The feeling of exultant joy that there is anyone like that in the world. I shall never see him again, and he did not notice me, or would ever, but there is such a person alive, there is such a life, and I am here on this earth, in this age, to know it!"

-- On Charles Lindbergh, in Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





"Charles is life itself — pure life, force, like sunlight — and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him — caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in."

-- On Charles Lindbergh, in Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





"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. ... Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us — many days, many nights of stars."

-- On Charles Lindbergh, in Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)





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