Top 88 Kathleen Norris Quotes
#2. I could suddenly grasp that not ever having to think about what to wear was freedom, that a drastic stripping down to essentials in one's dress might also be a drastic enrichment of one's ability to focus on more important things.
Kathleen Norris
#3. If monks are crazy to live the way they do, maybe the world needs more such craziness, what Matthew Kelty has termed 'the madness of great love.' My narrow world had just opened wide, and I had glimpsed such a love.
Kathleen Norris
#4. When you come to a place where you have to left or right,' says Sister Ruth, 'go straight ahead.
Kathleen Norris
#5. From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.
Kathleen Norris
#6. Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.
Kathleen Norris
#7. From Return of Swamp Thing
It's the old impasse:
I don't know what to wait for.
Kathleen Norris
#8. The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances.
Kathleen Norris
#9. In choosing a bare bones existence, we are enriched, and can redefine success as an internal process rather than an outward display of wealth and power.
Kathleen Norris
#10. Might we consider boredom as not only necessary for our life but also as one of its greatest blessings? A gift, pure and simple, a precious chance to be alone with our thoughts and alone with God?
Kathleen Norris
#11. Ironically, it seems that it is by the means of seemingly perfunctory daily rituals and routines that we enhance the personal relationships that nourish and sustain us.
Kathleen Norris
#12. One may have been a fool, but there's no foolishness like being bitter.
Kathleen Norris
#13. An old farmer once asked my husband and me how long we'd been in the country. "Five years," we answered. "Well, then," he said, "you've seen rain.
Kathleen Norris
#14. My book might be seen as a search for lower consciousness, an attempt to remove the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings.
Kathleen Norris
#15. The often heard lament, 'I have so little time,' gives the lie to the
delusion that the daily is of little significance.
Kathleen Norris
#16. I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.
Kathleen Norris
#17. To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.
Kathleen Norris
#18. Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,
service is the secret.
Kathleen Norris
#19. I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.
Kathleen Norris
#21. None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives.
Kathleen Norris
#22. Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.
Kathleen Norris
#23. When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?
Kathleen Norris
#24. It may be fashionable to assert that all is holy, but not many are willing to haul ass to church four or five times a day to sing about it. It's not for the faint of heart.
Kathleen Norris
#25. There are men I could spend eternity with. But not this life.
Kathleen Norris
#26. Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
Kathleen Norris
#27. Because we are made in God's image, in fleeing from a relationship with a loving God, we are also running from being our most authentic selves.
Kathleen Norris
#28. Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.
Kathleen Norris
#29. Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours.
Kathleen Norris
#30. Wantonness might be sheer desperation, masking a suicidal self-debasement, but it might also represent a joyful, lusty sexuality that indicated, at heart, a vast generosity of spirit.
Kathleen Norris
#31. The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.
Kathleen Norris
#32. It's all so beautiful ... the spring ... and books and music and fires ... Why aren't they enough?
Kathleen Norris
#33. Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
Kathleen Norris
#34. Each and every one of us has one obligation, during the bewildered days of our pilgrimage here: the saving of his own soul, and secondarily and incidentally thereby affecting for good such other souls as come under our influence.
Kathleen Norris
#35. My goal is to allow readers their own experience of whatever discovery I have made, so that it feels new to them, but also familiar, in that it is a piece with their own experience. It is a form of serious play.
Kathleen Norris
#36. The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.
Kathleen Norris
#37. This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.
Kathleen Norris
#39. Who can be good, if not made so by loving? - St. Augustine
Kathleen Norris
#40. Monastic people have long known--and I've experienced it in a small way myself--that the communal reciting, chanting, and singing of the psalms brings a unique sense of wholeness and order to their day, and even establishes the rhythm of their lives.
Kathleen Norris
#41. But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.
Kathleen Norris
#42. The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the "I do" of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.
Kathleen Norris
#43. The fact that one people's frontier is usually another's homeland has been mostly overlooked.
Kathleen Norris
#44. Whatever you do repeatedly," he writes, "has the power to shape you, has the power to make you over into a different person - even if you're not totally engaged' in every minute!
Kathleen Norris
#45. Being closed in makes us edgy because it reminds us of our vulnerability before the elements; we can't escape the fact that life is precarious.
Kathleen Norris
#48. I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
Kathleen Norris
#49. All of cleanliness is neither embraced nor denied by the taking of cold baths.
Kathleen Norris
#51. Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, "But what is there to see?" The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.
Kathleen Norris
#52. Throb
You cut me
into pieces and
put them in separate corners
of the room
each part
placed under pillows
or into water
I grow from this darkness
like starfish
my fingers know the shape to take again
Kathleen Norris
#53. Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.
Kathleen Norris
#54. Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day.
Kathleen Norris
#55. True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.
Kathleen Norris
#56. A prophet's task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone.
Kathleen Norris
#57. Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.
Kathleen Norris
#58. Listening to all words
the silent words of nature, the words of friends and enemies, and the words of scripture
can become an exercise in human yearning and divine response, flowing in and out of one's life like a river current.
Kathleen Norris
#59. ... religious traditions build up meaning only over time and in a communal context. They can't be purchased like a burger or a pair of shoes.
Kathleen Norris
#60. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness (Lam 3:21 - 23).
Kathleen Norris
#61. This is another day, O Lord ...
If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.
If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly.
If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently.
And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.
Kathleen Norris
#62. At its Greek root, "to believe" simply means "to give one's heart to." Thus, if we can determine what it is we give our heart to, then we will know what it is we believe.
Kathleen Norris
#63. Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas.
Kathleen Norris
#64. When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening ... I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.
Kathleen Norris
#65. For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn't know we needed and take us places where we didn't know we didn't want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.
Kathleen Norris
#66. Exile, like memory, may be a place of hope and delusion. But there are rules of light there and principles of darkness ... The expatriate is in search of a country, the exile in search of a self. - Eavan Boland, OBJECT LESSONS
Kathleen Norris
#67. Anger, [Evagrius] wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control.
Kathleen Norris
#68. Like an exasperating but invaluable friend, the Bible keeps bringing me back to my senses, often in bracing (and comical) ways.
Kathleen Norris
#69. A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
Kathleen Norris
#70. Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.
Kathleen Norris
#71. There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.
Kathleen Norris
#72. If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.
Kathleen Norris
#73. Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
Kathleen Norris
#74. Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.
Kathleen Norris
#75. In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.
Kathleen Norris
#76. If we are lucky, we can give in and rest without feeling guilty. We can stop doing and concentrate on being.
Kathleen Norris
#77. Listening to Jeremiah is one hell of a way to get your blood going in the morning; it puts caffeine to shame.
Kathleen Norris
#78. For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.
Kathleen Norris
#79. Anyone who listens to the world, anyone who seeks the sacred in the ordinary events of life, has problems about how to believe.
Kathleen Norris
#80. I was vaguely attracted to both library science and accounting, for the way that these disciplines impose order on chaos.
Kathleen Norris
#81. Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves.
Kathleen Norris
#82. Poets and monks ... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
Kathleen Norris
#83. Pay close attention to objects, events and natural phenomenon that would otherwise get chewed up in the daily grind.
Kathleen Norris
#84. But hope has an astonishing resilience and strength. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand.
Kathleen Norris
#85. Both liturgy and what is euphemistically termed 'domestic work' also have an intense relation with the present moment, a kind of faith in the present that fosters hope and makes life seem possible in the day-to-day.
Kathleen Norris
#86. One of the advantages of laws is that you can follow them blind, when you have lost all your moorings. You can't follow your instincts, but you can remember your rule.
Kathleen Norris
#87. I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.
Kathleen Norris
#88. It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won't allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.
Kathleen Norris
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