99+ Kathleen Norris Quotes on Books, Inspirational prayer and Wisdom grace - Quotes.pub

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But the joke is on us: what we think we are only ‘getting through’ has the power to change us, just as we have the power to transform what seems meaningless – the endless repetitions of a litany or the motions of vacuuming a floor.

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

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.

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

If monks are crazy to live the way they do, maybe the world needs more such craziness, what Matthew Kelty has termed ‘the madness of great love.’ My narrow world had just opened wide, and I had glimpsed such a love.

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.

Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.

I could suddenly grasp that not ever having to think about what to wear was freedom, that a drastic stripping down to essentials in one’s dress might also be a drastic enrichment of one’s ability to focus on more important things.

Well, they tell us meat isn’t good for us anyway!

The lover of books is a miner, searching for gold.

I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers, buying more bits and pieces – two or more cars, two homes and all that fills them – and outfitting one’s body for a wide variety of identities: business person, homebody, amateur athlete, traveler, theater or sports fan.

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.

Changing husbands is only changing troubles.

Monastic people have long known – and I’ve experienced it in a small way myself – that the communal reciting, chanting, and singing of the psalms brings a unique sense of wholeness and order to their day, and even establishes the rhythm of their lives.

Being closed in makes us edgy because it reminds us of our vulnerability before the elements; we can’t escape the fact that life is precarious.

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

It may be fashionable to assert that all is holy, but not many are willing to haul ass to church four or five times a day to sing about it. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Listening to all words – the silent words of nature, the words of friends and enemies, and the words of scripture – can become an exercise in human yearning and divine response, flowing in and out of one’s life like a river current.

The fact that one people’s frontier is usually another’s homeland has been mostly overlooked.

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

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

It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won’t allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.

From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine. To be more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.

Wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom.

Conversion is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people – even the difficult, unbearable ones – are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?

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.

I’ve come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Blaming others wouldn’t do. Only when I began to see the world’s ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior.

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

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

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

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

I write what I would like to read.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Peace – that was the other name for home.

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.

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