Kathleen Norris (poet) Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Kathleen Norris
This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.

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

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
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
Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.

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

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

Kathleen Norris
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