Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) was an American author. The wife of the famous flyer Charles A. Lindbergh, Anne was an aviator in her own right. Anne’s books and articles spanned genres from poetry to nonfiction, encompassing topics as varied as youth and age, love and marriage, peace, solitude and contentment, and the role of women in the 20th century.
Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Anne was a shy, quiet child. From an early age, Anne Morrow wrote plays and discovered through writing her association with the world. She met Charles, an international hero following his 1927 transatlantic solo flight from New York to Paris, at an official reception at the United States Embassy in Mexico where her father Dwight Morrow was serving as the American ambassador.
After they married, Anne accompanied Charles on many goodwill tours and business trips promoting aviation. She even learned to fly herself in 1930, becoming the first woman to obtain a glider pilot’s license. In 1934, she was awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal—she was the first woman so honored. After Anne and Charles’s two-year-old son was kidnapped and murdered, the family sailed secretly to England to escape the resulting sensationalism and publicity.
Anne re-established the literary career that she had put on hold after marriage. Her writings, such as narratives of her flights with her husband (1933,) North to the Orient (1935,) Gift from the Sea (1955,) and War Within and Without (1980,) told of her life experiences, especially those regarding aviation, the 1932 kidnapping and murder of her son, the political climate of the times, and her general philosophy.
In The Wave of the Future (1940,) she advocated American domestic reforms in keeping with her husband’s isolationist views of the time. The book was intended to explain Lindbergh’s position and to help restore her husband’s reputation in the eyes of the American people. The Unicorn (1956) collects her poems. Gift from the Sea is a popular inspirational book, reflecting on the lives of American women.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Patience
One could sit still and look at life from the air; that was it. And I was conscious again of the fundamental magic of flying, a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes – speed, accessibility, and convenience – and will not change as they change. Looking down from the air that morning, I felt that stillness rested like a light over the earth. What motion there was took on a slow grace, like slow-motion pictures which catch the moment of outstretched beauty that one cannot see in life itself, so swiftly does it move.
And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down to the still world below the choppy waves – it will always remain magic.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Flying
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Balance, Silence, Music
If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Focus, Concentration
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Being Ourselves
Only in growth, reform and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Future, The Future
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Thinking
By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Work
When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Self-Knowledge
One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay “in kind” somewhere else in life.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Thankfulness, Gratitude
Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Time Management, Value of Time
Grief can’t be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Grieving, Grief
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few and they are more beautiful if they are a few.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Value
Only with winter-patience can we bring
The deep desired, long-awaited spring.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Seasons
To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Giving, Kindness, Charity
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Failures, Courage, Mistakes, Success, Bravery
It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the The Mind desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. 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. How often in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us. Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us—or having found them dry. Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Solitude
It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Adversity, Courage
People “died” all the time … Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions—decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out … you always knew when you made a decision against life … The door clicked and you were safe inside safe and dead.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Decisions
Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Friendship
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.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Flying
I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, 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.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Harmony, Simplicity
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Communication
One must lose one’s life in order to find it.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Change, Kindness
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Light, Sleep
Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Truth
What a commentary on our civilization when being alone is considered suspect, when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it-like a secret vice!
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Solitude
Don’t wish me happiness.
I don’t expect to be happy all the time…
It’s gotten beyond that somehow.
Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor.
I will need them all.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: The Future, Future
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Amelia Earhart American Aviator
Charles Lindbergh American Aviator, Conservationist
Richard Evelyn Byrd American Aviator
Beryl Markham English-African Aviator
Margaret Mitchell American Novelist
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis American First Lady
Angelina Jolie American Actor
Richard Bach American Novelist
Fred Astaire American Dancer, Singer
Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist