Kathleen Norris Quotes

Enjoy the top 112 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Kathleen Norris.

“Pay close attention to objects, events and natural phenomenon that would otherwise get chewed up in the daily grind.”
— Kathleen Norris —

“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

“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

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

— Kathleen Norris

“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

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

“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

“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

“The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.”

— Kathleen Norris

“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

“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

Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.

— Kathleen Norris

“For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.”

— Kathleen Norris

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise
to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things
in order to make it come out right.

— Kathleen Norris

“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

“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

“I was vaguely attracted to both library science and accounting, for the way that these disciplines impose order on chaos.”

— Kathleen Norris

“When I see teenagers out in public with their families, holding back, refusing to walk with mom and dad, ashamed to be seen as part of a family, I have to admit that I have acted that way myself, at times, with regard to my Christian inheritance. A hapless and mortally embarrassed adolescent lurked behind the sophisticated mask I wrote in my twenties: faith was something for little kids and grandmas, not me.”

— Kathleen Norris

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

“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

“In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.”

— Kathleen Norris

“All of cleanliness is neither embraced nor denied by the taking of cold baths.”

— Kathleen Norris

“To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.”

— Kathleen Norris

Most anyone who has endeavored to maintain the habit of prayer, or making art, or regular exercise ... knows the syndrome well. When I sit down to pray or write, a host of thoughts arise. I should call to find out how so-and-so is doing. I should dust and organize my desk, because I will get more work done in a neater space. While I'm at it, I might as well load and start the washing machine. I may truly desire to write, but as I am pulled to one task after another I lose the ability to concentrate on the work at hand. Any activity, even scrubbing the toilet, seems more compelling than sitting down to face the blank page.

— Kathleen Norris

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

I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers, buying more bits and pieces - two or more cars, two homes and all that fills them - and outfitting one's body for a wide variety of identities: business person, homebody, amateur athlete, traveler, theater or sports fan.

— Kathleen Norris

“Excerpts from the Angel Handbook
Be careful how you unfold your wings
there are some in the world who are not content
unless their teeth are full of feathers
...
You will meet some whose faces give a glw
as if they once had halos:
these are the lovers,
you will make a lot of love
and your flights, even though you are careful
to keep them invisible, will make those who love you sad:
they will not understand that you never go anyplace
you're not meant to be.”

— Kathleen Norris

“Small-town churchgoers are often labeled hypocrites, and sometimes they are. But maybe they are also people who have learned to lived with imperfection, what Archbishop Rembert Weakland, a Benedictine, recently described as "the new asceticism." Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.”

— Kathleen Norris

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

“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

“And a lot he knows about office work, not.”

— Kathleen Norris

“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

“Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.”

— Kathleen Norris

It seems clear, from reading the daily news if nothing else, that there will always be some in this world who want their holy wars, who will discriminate, vilify, and even kill in the name of God. They have narrowed down the concept of neighbor to include only those like themselves, in terms of creed, caste, race, sex, or sexual orientation. But there is also much evidence that there are many who know that a neighbor might be anyone at all, and are willing to act on that assumption.

— Kathleen Norris

“And she came to the monk wearing cosmetics, much gold jewelry, and an elaborate silk dress. The monk admonished her gently; 'By supposing your body to require [all this],' he said,'you condemn the Creator for deficiency.' It is a remark that might be interpreted as misogyny, but in the context of the story
the monk pleads that he is only a man with the same nature as hers, and has no special access to God
it is clear that the monk believes the woman to be made in the image of God, good as she is, without unnecessary adornment.”

— Kathleen Norris

“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

“I had begun to comprehend that the Bible's story is about the relationship of God to human beings, and of human beings to one another, and that this meant that it is our friendships, marriages, families, and even church congregations that best reveal what kind of theology we have, who our God is. Or, as Thomas Merton once put it, "because we love, God is present." That is the story.”

— Kathleen Norris

“Acedia is not a relic of the fourth century or a hang-up of some weird Christian monks, but a force we ignore at our peril. Whenever we focus on the foibles of celebrities to the detriment of learning more about the real world- the emergence of fundamentalist religious and nationalist movements, the economic factors endangering our reefs and rain forests, the social and ecological damage caused by factory farming - acedia is at work. Wherever we run to escape it, acedia is there, propelling us to 'the next best thing,' another paradise to revel in and wantonly destroy. It also sends us backward, prettying the past with the gloss of nostalgia. Acedia has come so far with us that it easily attached to our hectic and overburdened schedules. We appear to be anything but slothful, yet that is exactly what we are, as we do more and care less, and feel pressured to do still more.”

— Kathleen Norris

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

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

“The darkness is still with us, O Lord. You are still hidden and the world which you have made does not want to know you or receive you ... You are still the hidden child in a world grown old ... You are still obscured by the veils of this world's history, you are still destined not to be acknowledged in the scandal of your death on the cross ... But I, O hidden Lord of all things, boldly affirm my faith in you. In confessing you, I take my stand with you ... If I make this avowal of faith, it must pierce the depths of my heart like a sword, I must bend my knee before you, saying, I must alter my life. I have still to become a Christian. -Karl Rahner, PRAYERS FOR MEDITATION”

— Kathleen Norris

“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

“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

“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

Poets and monks ... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.

— Kathleen Norris

“When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?”