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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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Kathleen Norris
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Disillusioning
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More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.
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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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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I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
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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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 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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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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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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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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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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I write what I would like to read.
Kathleen Norris