354 Quotes by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

# "I saw the most beautiful cat today. It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied, so complacent.

Packing is chiefly planning – if it is.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.

We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather – for I believe the heart is infinite – modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry.

No man is an island,′ said John Donne. I feel we are all islands – in a common sea.

What a crippling art writing is, no body to it, no craft, really. It’s all in the mind and you never see it or feel it – only sometimes hear it. It uses only such a small part of man. I wish I were a sculptor.

People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that – just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden.

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 mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.

Milky and opaque, it has the pinkish bloom of the sky on a summer evening, ripening to rain.