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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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Kathleen Norris
Moving
Outrun
Place
Attach
Change
Surrender
Suffer
Oneself
Move
Suffering
American

More quotes by Kathleen Norris

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Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.
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Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
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This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.
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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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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.
Kathleen Norris
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Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
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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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The often heard lament, 'I have so little time,' gives the lie to the delusion that the daily is of little significance.
Kathleen Norris
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In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made
Kathleen Norris
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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.
Kathleen Norris
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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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They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.
Kathleen Norris
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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.
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
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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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Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours.
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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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