Best Quotes by Kathleen Norris (Top 10)
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Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.
Kathleen Norris
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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
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Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
Kathleen Norris
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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
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In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.
Kathleen Norris
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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
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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
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Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,—service is the secret.
Kathleen Norris
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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
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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
More Kathleen Norris Quotes
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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
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Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
Kathleen Norris
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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
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Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.
Kathleen Norris
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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
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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
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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.
Kathleen Norris
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Hate is all a lie, there is no truth in hate.
Kathleen Norris
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One may have been a fool, but there's no foolishness like being bitter.
Kathleen Norris
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Peace - that was the other name for home.
Kathleen Norris
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Changing husbands is only changing troubles.
Kathleen Norris
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In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary
Kathleen Norris
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When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?
Kathleen Norris
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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
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There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.
Kathleen Norris
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Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.
Kathleen Norris
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There are men I could spend eternity with. But not this life.
Kathleen Norris
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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
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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