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.

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

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.

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.

Changing husbands is only changing troubles.

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