“To see the way different people have worked out marriage is wonderful. As though each one had been given a block of wood to make something of. For some it is easy and seems all ready-made. For others, very very difficult—some people give up. Many of us think it should be given to us ready-made, all carved, and then throw it away to pick up a new one, expecting that to be all carved. I don’t think you ever get a perfect marriage given to you. It is like your face, or your body, or your circumstances, or your life. It’s given to you to make something out of.”

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, diary entry dated Monday, July 22, 1935, Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 287–88.