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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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More quotes by 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.
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Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.
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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.
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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.
Kathleen Norris
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Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
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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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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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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There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.
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When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.
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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 High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.
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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I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers.
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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They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.
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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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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Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.
Kathleen Norris