"The thing about God … is that He usually does help, but not until you’ve made an effort on your own."
— From The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson, chapter “The Enormous Plastic Sausage,” (page 118 in NYRB edition, translated by Thomas Teal)
"It is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is most enriching."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (1955), chapter 7: A Few Shells
"It is only framed in space the beauty blooms. … A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift From the Sea (1955), Chapter 7: A Few Shells
"[The web of marriage] is made of loyalties, and interdependencies, and shared experiences. It is woven of memories of meetings and conflicts; of triumphs and disappointments. It is a web of communication, a common language, and the acceptance of lack of language too; a knowledge of likes and dislikes, of habits and reactions, both physical and mental … It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift From the Sea (1955), Chapter5: Oyster Bed
"Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (1955), Chapter 3: Moon Shell
"Instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (1955), chapter 3: Moon Shell
"So much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (1955), chapter 2: Channelled Whelk
"The compensation of growing old … was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light."
— Peter Walsh’s thoughts, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, page 79 (Harcourt 1981 edition)
"You can take anything. No matter how good you treat it — it wants to be free. You can treat it good and feed it good and give it everything it seems to want — but if you open the cage — it’s happy."
— Tom Robinson, former slave. Quoted in Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave (1968), page 138
"Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the group will struggle for it."
— Solomon Northup, former slave. Quoted in Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave (1968), page 128
