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

Kathleen Norris

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Kathleen Norris
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Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.
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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.
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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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Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
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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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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.
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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?
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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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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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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.
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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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Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours.
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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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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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I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
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There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.
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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.
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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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The often heard lament, 'I have so little time,' gives the lie to the delusion that the daily is of little significance.
Kathleen Norris