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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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Kathleen Norris
Grace
Unwelcome
Wonderful
Disguised
Maybe
Recognizing
Often
Gentle
Comes
Difficulty
Order
Failure
Change
Loss
Made
Accepting

More quotes by Kathleen Norris

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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.
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The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.
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We can't give our children the future, strive though we may to make it secure. But we can give them the present.
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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.
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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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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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Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
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I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
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I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers.
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The often heard lament, 'I have so little time,' gives the lie to the delusion that the daily is of little significance.
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When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.
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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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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.
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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.
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Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
Kathleen Norris
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The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.
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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Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.
Kathleen Norris
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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
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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