LINDBERGH, Anne Morrow - Gift from the Sea

GIFT FROM THE SEA by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

QUOTES FOR DISCUSSION

… a little hermit crab, who has run away, leaving his tracks behind him like a delicate vine on the sand. He ran away, and left me his shell. It was once a protection to him.

Pg. 15

Why did he run away? Did he hope to find a better home, a better mode of living? I too have run away, I realize, I have shed the shell of my life for these few weeks of vacation.

Pg. 16

The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life. How long she will hold this enviable and precarious position no one knows. But her particular situation has a significance far above his apparent economic, national or even sex limitations.

Pg. 21

Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century. Yet, the problem is particularly and essentially woman’s. Distraction is, always has been, and probably always will be, inherent in woman’s life.

Pg. 22

One collects material possession not only for security, comfort or vanity, but for beautify as well. Is your sea-shell house not ugly and bare? No, it is beautiful, my house. It is bare, of course, but the wind, the sun, the smell of the pines blow through its bareness.

Pg. 27

To ask how little, not how much, can I get along with. To say – is it necessary? – when I am tempted to add one more accumulation to my life, when I am pulled toward one more centrifugal activity.

Pg. 28

The final answer, I know, is always inside. But the outside can give a clue, can help one to find the inside answer. One is free, like the hermit crab, to change one’s shell.

Pg. 29

We are solitary. WE may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better is it to realize that we are, yes, even to being by assuming it.

Pg. 35

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity. An early wallflower panic still clings to the word. One will be left, one fears, sitting in a straight-backed chair alone, while the popular girls are already chose and spinning around the dance…

Pg. 35

Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.

Pg. 42

Is this then only an economic problem? I do not think so. Every paid worker, no matter where in the economic scale, expects a day off a week and a vacation a year. By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class. They rarely even complain of their lack, apparently not considering occasional time to themselves as a justifiable need.

Pg. 42

A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

Pg. 63

- if only we could have each of our children alone, not just for part of each day, but for part of each month, each year. Would they not be happier, stronger and, in the end, more independent because more secure?  

Pg. 63

Evening is the time for conversation. Morning is for mental work, I feel, the habit of school-days persisting in me. Afternoon is for physical tasks, the out-of-door jobs. But evening is for sharing, for communication.

Pg. 94