58+ Kathleen Norris Quotes On Education, Religion And Bible

Kathleen Norris was an American poet and novelist. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1947 and grew up in San Diego, California. She is known for her poetry collections, including Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, which won the Poets' Prize in 1997. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Kathleen Norris on life, love, education.

Top 10 Kathleen Norris Quotes

1. Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
2. Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
3. In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.
4. 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.
5. Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.
6. Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.
7. They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.
8. Peace - that was the other name for home.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas.
• There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.
• 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 and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
• There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.
• 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?
• Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.
• This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.

Kathleen Norris Quotes About Life

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

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

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. — Kathleen Norris

Life is easier to take than you think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable. — Kathleen Norris

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

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

Kathleen Norris Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can't give our children the future, strive though we may to make it secure. But we can give them the present. — 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

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

Changing husbands is only changing troubles. — Kathleen Norris

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

It's all so beautiful . . . the spring . . . and books and music and fires. . . . Why aren't they enough? — Kathleen Norris

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

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. — Kathleen Norris

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

In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made — Kathleen Norris

I write what I would like to read. — Kathleen Norris

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

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

The often heard lament, 'I have so little time,' gives the lie to the delusion that the daily is of little significance. — Kathleen Norris

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. — Kathleen Norris

Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours. — 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

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

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

Life Lessons by Kathleen Norris

1. Kathleen Norris teaches us to be humble and to appreciate the small moments in life. She encourages us to look at the world with a sense of wonder and to be mindful of our own mortality. Lastly, Norris encourages us to be kind and generous to those around us, as we never know what struggles they may be facing.