Anne Spencer Lindbergh was an American author and aviator, wife of decorated pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh, with whom she made many exploratory flights.
Following the kidnap and murder of their eldest child, they lived in Europe, where Charles was impressed by Germany’s new air power. When they returned to America, he led the isolationist America First Committee. Anne’s supporting booklet The Wave of the Future declared that fascism was the inevitable way forward; she had also written a letter praising Hitler in unequivocal terms.
After the war, she moved away from politics, writing extensive poetry and nonfiction, Gift from the Sea being an inspirational book for women that appears to foreshadow the green movement. (via Wikipedia)
A few of her great quotes are listed below:
On Love:
Love is a force. It is not a result it is a cause. It is not a product it produces. It is a power, like money or steam or electricity.
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.
Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.
On Life:
Life is a gift, given in trust – like a child.
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much social life is exhausting one is wearing a mask.
The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.
On Faith:
We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.
It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
On Writing:
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.
One writes not to be read but to breathe…one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one’s mind, to dissipate one’s fears, to face one’s doubts, to look at one’s mistakes–in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one’s joy, but also to disperse one’s gloom. Like prayer–you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to ‘grace’.
The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.
Other Quotes:
Don’t wish me happiness
I don’t expect to be happy all the time…
It’s gotton beyond that somehow.
Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor.
I will need them all.
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeded.
Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.