(1906–2001)
U.S. writer and aviator
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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!
Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 43–44.
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone.
Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 44.
I keep forgetting how precious those moments are—when art puts a glaze over life and arrests it and you can stop and look at it and sink into it without being pulled off the edge of the picture by the strings that lead to daily life. How can you ever see life unless you see it that way?
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 20.
I don’t think I like writing letters in type. It is slow, and then it seems so terribly public. I am shocked at what I put down, as though it had appeared in the newspapers. Also, it looks too permanent, too definite and irrefutable. It embarrasses me, too, like talking over the long-distance telephone.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 127.
I must slough off people—too many connections, too many people, too many entanglements. But it will take all the time just saying no. I don’t help them, they don’t help me. It’s just bitter useless waste of lives, time, soul—everything.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 23.
Will I ever get home? It is like looking down a tremendous ski jump. The bottom is not so far away in time, but in effort and all one has to give to it, such a mighty jump.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 127.
You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 44.
Flying again. The things I had forgotten—things going under that still suspended wheel. How slow the cars. The pattern of houses doubled with their shadows, boxlike houses. How still the water—a boat cutting the water like shears—the heavy satin rippling back, falling away on either side. Frozen waterfalls. Woven cloth fields, rows, stripes, checks, cavalry twill, corduroy, tweed, homespun. Suddenly an arrow and a circle on a field—an air sign. The excitement of a secret language. That huge orange arrow meant nothing to the people down there—only to me. It spoke to me: “Airport this way,” and I understood, and felt like God.
Description of flying from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s diary entry dated Thursday, March 30, 1933, in Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 24.
I am doing it right over again. I am sick of clothes and gewgaws and bags and advertisements and newspaper clippings and society pages and the new Vogue and fittings and the main floors of department stores and the radio—jazz and magazines and hairdressers. I am sick sick to death of them. But I clutch at them madly, like smoking or drinking—anything to keep from thinking.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 15.
It isn’t the sorrow of last winter that stabs, it is those moments of hope—remembering those moments of hope is unbearable.
I planned to have him sleep in my bed the first night he came back.
It is not hard looking back at sorrow but at happiness.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 14.
Death: We will all have it. In a century this distance between him and me will be nothing.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 13.
Death to you is not death, not obituary notices and quiet and mourning, sermons and elegies and prayers, coffins and graves and wordy platitudes. It is not the most common experience in life—the only certainty. It is not the oldest thing we know. It is not what happened to Caesar and Dante and Milton and Mary Queen of Scots, to the soldiers in all the wars, to the sick in the plagues, to public men yesterday. It never happened before—what happened today to you. It has only happened to your little boy…
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 12.