Kathleen Norris Quotes

Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.

If we are lucky, we can give in and rest without feeling guilty. We can stop doing and concentrate on being.

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.

Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value. The world doesn't care if I write another word, and if I am to care, I have to summon all my interior motivation and strength.

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

Peace - that was the other name for home.

Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.

I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?

Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.

A short-lived fascination with another person may be exciting-I think we've all seen people aglow, in a state of being "in love with love"-but such an attraction is not sustainable over the long run. Paradoxically, human love is sanctified not in the height of attraction and enthusiasm, but in the everyday struggles of living with another person. It is not in romance but in routine that the possibilities for transformation are made manifest. And that requires commitment.

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.

There are men I could spend eternity with. But not this life.

But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that the religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, and these days it is easy to lose sight of that as, like our society itself, churches are becoming more politicized and polarized. Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.

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.

The demon of acedia -- also called the noonday demon -- is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. . . . He makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and . . . he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself.

Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas.

Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.

Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.

The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.

I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers.

Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.

This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.

One may have been a fool, but there's no foolishness like being bitter.

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

Like faith, marriage is a mystery. The person you're committed to spending your life with is known and yet unknown, at the same time remarkably intimate and necessarily other. The classic seven-year itch may not be a case of familiarity breeding ennui and contempt, but the shock of having someone you thought you knew all too well suddenly seem a stranger. When that happens, you are compelled to either recommit to the relationship or get the hell out. There are many such times in a marriage.

You can only see one thing clearly, and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that, and cling to it through thick and thin.

Wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom.

When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.

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.

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

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.

Changing husbands is only changing troubles.

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.

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

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

I write what I would like to read.

But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.

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'.

There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.

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.

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.

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

We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.