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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
Suffering
American
Moving
Outrun
Place
Attach
Change
Surrender
Suffer
Oneself
Move

More quotes by Kathleen Norris

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When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.
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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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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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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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Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
Kathleen Norris
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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.
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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I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers.
Kathleen Norris
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I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
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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I write what I would like to read.
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
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Pay close attention to objects, events and natural phenomenon that would otherwise get chewed up in the daily grind.
Kathleen Norris
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There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.
Kathleen Norris
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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.
Kathleen Norris
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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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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.
Kathleen Norris
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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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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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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