Kathleen Norris famous quotes

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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

#Motivational #Prayer #Thinking
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

#Loss #Order #Grace
Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
-- Kathleen Norris

#Happiness #Book #Long
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

#Children #Way #Taught
Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.
-- Kathleen Norris

#Secret #Position
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

#Christian #Religious #Views
In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.
-- Kathleen Norris

#Funny #Life #Witty
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

#Goal #Vision #Delay
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

#Giving #Grace #Attention
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
-- Kathleen Norris

#Inspirational #Change #Past
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

#Heart #Receiving #Dignity
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

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

#Ordinary #Baking #Bread
The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the â€œI doâ€ of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.
-- Kathleen Norris

#Mean #Saying Yes #Cost
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

#Who We Are #Essentials #Tasks
It's all so beautiful . . . the spring . . . and books and music and fires. . . . Why aren't they enough?
-- Kathleen Norris

#Beautiful #Spring #Book
Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.
-- Kathleen Norris

#Together #Christ #Absurd
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

#Children #Book #Pride
I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
-- Kathleen Norris

#Joy #Taught #Masters
This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.
-- Kathleen Norris

#Helping #Dictionary
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

#Christian #Ideas #Desire
When you come to a place where you have to left or right,' says Sister Ruth, 'go straight ahead.
-- Kathleen Norris

#Ruth

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