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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.

Kathleen Norris

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Kathleen Norris
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More quotes by Kathleen Norris

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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.
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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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Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.
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Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.
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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.
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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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Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
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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.
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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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Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
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The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.
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Pay close attention to objects, events and natural phenomenon that would otherwise get chewed up in the daily grind.
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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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But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.
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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.
Kathleen Norris
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I write what I would like to read.
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When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.
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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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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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The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.
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