Kathleen Norris > Quotes

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

“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 Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Woman's "Work"

“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, The Cloister Walk

“In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“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 or get the hell out. There are many such times in a marriage.”
― Kathleen Norris

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

“This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.”
― Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

“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, Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life

“It's all so beautiful . . . the spring . . . and books and music and fires. . . . Why aren't they enough?”
― Kathleen Norris, Saturday's Child

“Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.”
― Kathleen Norris

“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.”
― Kathleen Norris

“I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?”
― Kathleen Norris, The Psalms

“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.”
― Kathleen Norris

“Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.”
― Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

“Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“The Bible is full of evidence that God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us--loves us so much that we the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is "renewed in the morning" or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, "our inner nature is being renewed everyday". Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous details in Leviticus involving God in the minuitae of daily life might be revisioned as the very love of God. ”
― Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Woman's "Work"

“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, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.”
― Kathleen Norris, Saturday's Child

“The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry. ”
― Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Woman's "Work"

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”
― Kathleen Norris

“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, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“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

“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, Saturday's Child

“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, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“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

“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, Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life

“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, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Woman's "Work"

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”
―”
― Kathleen Norris

“All of cleanliness is neither embraced nor denied by the taking of cold baths.”
― Kathleen Norris, Saturday's Child

“And a lot he knows about office work, not.”
― Kathleen Norris, Saturday's Child

“Well, they tell us meat isn't good for us anyway!”
― Kathleen Norris, Saturday's Child

“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

“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, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“When it comes to the nitty-gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God's love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it as a reality that humbles us even as it gives cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that marks each day rich with the possibility of salvation. ”
― Kathleen Norris

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."
—”
― Kathleen Norris