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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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Kathleen Norris
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More quotes by 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.
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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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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 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 was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
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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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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The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.
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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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When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.
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Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.
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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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
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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 write what I would like to read.
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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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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Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
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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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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