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
Only in growth, reform and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Sleep
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.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Religion
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Mistakes, Courage, Failures, Bravery, Success
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: Courage, Adversity
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
One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay “in kind” somewhere else in life.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Gratitude
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
If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Topics: Time Management, Value of Time
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
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