Kathleen Norris Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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
I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers…

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

Kathleen Norris
I think people have to be rather simple to think each other wonderful, and to hear the same jokes, and express the same opinions for fifty years. I've always noticed that the persons who had golden weddings looked rather dull.

Kathleen Norris
There is no situation so high or so luxurious that it is not utterly dreary without friends; and there is no place so isolated and quiet and obscure but what we love it if the persons we love are there.

Kathleen Norris
He had discovered the utter superfluousness of words: so many said — so little accomplished by them!

Kathleen Norris
There's nothing so upsetting to one's philosophy as meeting an entirely happy person!

Kathleen Norris
As for voluntarily using the telephone in the morning, I no more think of it than of using my great-grandmother's spinning-wheel. Not that a telephone need be a real interruption to one's work, but then it almost always is.

Kathleen Norris
Faithful, self-forgetting service, and the love that spends itself over and over, only to be renewed again and again, are the secret of happiness.

Kathleen Norris
Her thoughts went on, happy thoughts, yet with an undercurrent of that soberness that is the inevitable fruit of life.

Kathleen Norris
Life, although it takes us many years and many tears to discover it, life is only another name for death; they cannot exist independently.

Kathleen Norris
There's no loneliness like the loneliness of people who are living together, and who don't belong together.

Kathleen Norris
None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting to change all the tenor of our lives.

Kathleen Norris
Don't be strong-minded, dear. Men don't like women who are self-assertive and independent, Vicky; truly they don't. A man always likes to feel the superior!

Kathleen Norris
Syncletica sums up, I believe, the difficulty writers have in America in surviving success: to keep bearing fruit one must keep returning, humbly, to the blank page, to the uncertainty of the writing process, and not pay much heed to the 'noted author' the world wants you to be.

Kathleen Norris
Gordon was his own world, and nothing that concerned anyone else was important to him, and nothing that touched him unimportant.

Kathleen Norris
The difference between having a good book to read and not having a good book to read is just about the difference between darkness and light.

Kathleen Norris
San Francisco always is and always will be the youngest at heart of all the cities in the world.

Kathleen Norris
Gail walked back to the library at one o'clock moralizing in her own soul upon the desirability of making the best of things in this curious world, putting up with what could not be changed, enduring what could not be cured.

Kathleen Norris
Life has a strange way of making us pay for our blunders in the exact coinage we misspent.

Kathleen Norris
The trouble with us is our hair, Pen. The minute men see a woman with our sort of hair they get interested — it doesn't matter who they are or where they are. Their first thought is, 'Gosh, what hair!' and from that moment on you simply don't like them. You know what fools they are.

Kathleen Norris
The good things end and the bad things end,
But the sum of it all at the last is gain,
While books and the cliffs and the seas remain,
And the strong true hand of a friend.

Kathleen Norris
Hedda always tells us things the first time as if it were the twentieth, and her patience quite worn out with telling us!

Kathleen Norris
She was one of those fortunate persons who can make listeners believe that they have achieved something by merely talking about it. Lucy could somehow make an overdue bill seem more creditable to her than many a woman could a bank-account. She was amazingly glib.

Kathleen Norris
But people's as quick to forget favors as to ask thim, we all know that.

Kathleen Norris
There's no marriage that couldn't be a success, and no marriage that couldn't be a failure. It depends on the women who are in 'em!

Kathleen Norris
If we do not always see our own mistakes and omissions we can always see those of our neighbors.

Kathleen Norris
That was old San Francisco, the gay, young, wind-swept, fog- shrouded city scattered about on seven times seven sand hills; a city ringed with dunes and with steep cobbled streets going down to wooden piers, and masts and hulls, and the blue waters of the bay.

Kathleen Norris
The clearing-house of the brain, the wings of the spirit, books lift us away from the petty, crowded day's smallness and entanglement.

Kathleen Norris
[The] very hot day... was like a last flaming hand-clasp from the departing summer.

Kathleen Norris