The fundamental magic of flying, a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes – purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience – and will not change as they change.
One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief.
Certain springs are tapped only when you’re alone.
It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feelings one can go through in one day.
Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.
So many things we love are you!
And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down on the still world below the choppy waves – it will always remain magic.
Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.
The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.
Life is a gift, given in trust – like a child.
For the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.
Certain environments, certain modes of life, and certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification is one of them.
I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.
Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us – many days, many nights of stars.
When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race.
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.
Perhaps both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit – qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected. It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself.
One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.
Milky and opaque, it has the pinkish bloom of the sky on a summer evening, ripening to rain.
It is hard to recognize, or even to describe, but I think this freedom is the real reason the book continues to be so well loved and so well read after all these years. I am talking about the freedom that comes from choosing to remain open, as my mother did, to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change.