Kathleen Norris Quotes & Sayings

Poets and monks ... We're both sort of peripheral to the world. — Kathleen Norris

Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas. — Kathleen Norris

Poetry was a discipline grounded in experience that drew its life and worth from a source much greater than oneself, and as it realized its potential to touch others in their innermost being, what [Kathleen] Fraser has termed their "yearning side," it could be a profoundly communal act. Poetry, when it succeeded, did so in ways that were not quantifiable, and did not look much like worldly success, but that might be summed up as the joy on the face of a girl in a dingy classroom who finds a kindred spirit in a poem by Garcia Lorca. — Kathleen Norris

I write what I would like to read. — Kathleen Norris

And she came to the monk wearing cosmetics, much gold jewelry, and an elaborate silk dress. The monk admonished her gently; 'By supposing your body to require [all this],' he said,'you condemn the Creator for deficiency.' It is a remark that might be interpreted as misogyny, but in the context of the story
the monk pleads that he is only a man with the same nature as hers, and has no special access to God
it is clear that the monk believes the woman to be made in the image of God, good as she is, without unnecessary adornment. — Kathleen Norris

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay. — Kathleen Norris

The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the "I do" of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married. — Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris, on the publication of her 78th book.
'All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it? — Kathleen Norris

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from... — Kathleen Norris

My book might be seen as a search for lower consciousness, an attempt to remove the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings. — Kathleen Norris

Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are. — Kathleen Norris

The fact that one people's frontier is usually another's homeland has been mostly overlooked. — Kathleen Norris

Wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom. — Kathleen Norris

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered. — Kathleen Norris

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. — Kathleen Norris

Whatever you do repeatedly," he writes, "has the power to shape you, has the power to make you over into a different person - even if you're not totally engaged' in every minute! — Kathleen Norris

Wantonness might be sheer desperation, masking a suicidal self-debasement, but it might also represent a joyful, lusty sexuality that indicated, at heart, a vast generosity of spirit. — Kathleen Norris

Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future. — Kathleen Norris

All of cleanliness is neither embraced nor denied by the taking of cold baths. — Kathleen Norris

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness (Lam 3:21 - 23). — Kathleen Norris

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular. — Kathleen Norris

When I see teenagers out in public with their families, holding back, refusing to walk with mom and dad, ashamed to be seen as part of a family, I have to admit that I have acted that way myself, at times, with regard to my Christian inheritance. A hapless and mortally embarrassed adolescent lurked behind the sophisticated mask I wrote in my twenties: faith was something for little kids and grandmas, not me. — Kathleen Norris

The classic 'seven-year itch' may not be a case of familiarity breeding ennui and contempt, but the shock of having someone you thought you knew all too well suddenly seem a stranger. When that happens, you are compelled to either recommit or get the hell out. There are many such times in a marriage. — Kathleen Norris

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

Ironically, it seems that it is by the means of seemingly perfunctory daily rituals and routines that we enhance the personal relationships that nourish and sustain us. — Kathleen Norris

Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day. — Kathleen Norris

For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown. — Kathleen Norris

One difficulty that people seeking to modernize hymnals and the language of worship inevitably run into is that contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn't. This is something all poets know; that language is a living thing, beyond our control, and it simply takes time for the trendy to reveal itself, to become so obviously dated that it falls by the way, and for the truly innovative to take hold. — Kathleen Norris

Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours. — Kathleen Norris

It's all so beautiful ... the spring ... and books and music and fires ... Why aren't they enough? — Kathleen Norris

I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers, buying more bits and pieces - two or more cars, two homes and all that fills them - and outfitting one's body for a wide variety of identities: business person, homebody, amateur athlete, traveler, theater or sports fan. — Kathleen Norris

Most anyone who has endeavored to maintain the habit of prayer, or making art, or regular exercise ... knows the syndrome well. When I sit down to pray or write, a host of thoughts arise. I should call to find out how so-and-so is doing. I should dust and organize my desk, because I will get more work done in a neater space. While I'm at it, I might as well load and start the washing machine. I may truly desire to write, but as I am pulled to one task after another I lose the ability to concentrate on the work at hand. Any activity, even scrubbing the toilet, seems more compelling than sitting down to face the blank page. — Kathleen Norris

As I listened to the Book of Revelation over several weeks I found in it a healing vision, a journey through the heart of pain and despair, and into hope. And I was consistently reminded of how subtly this vision works on us. It asserts that the evils of this world are not incurable, that injustice does not have the last word. And that can be terrifying or consoling, depending on your point of view, your place within the world. — Kathleen Norris

Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. — Kathleen Norris

Like an exasperating but invaluable friend, the Bible keeps bringing me back to my senses, often in bracing (and comical) ways. — Kathleen Norris

Listening to all words
the silent words of nature, the words of friends and enemies, and the words of scripture
can become an exercise in human yearning and divine response, flowing in and out of one's life like a river current. — Kathleen Norris

The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry. — Kathleen Norris

I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change. — Kathleen Norris

It seems clear, from reading the daily news if nothing else, that there will always be some in this world who want their holy wars, who will discriminate, vilify, and even kill in the name of God. They have narrowed down the concept of neighbor to include only those like themselves, in terms of creed, caste, race, sex, or sexual orientation. But there is also much evidence that there are many who know that a neighbor might be anyone at all, and are willing to act on that assumption. — Kathleen Norris

Many people are just waking to the reality that unlimited expansion, what we call progress, is not possible in this world, and maybe looking to monks (who seek to live within limitations) as well as rural Dakotans (whose limitations are forced upon them by isolation and a harsh climate) can teach us how to live more realistically. These unlikely people might also help us overcome the pathological fear of death and the inability to deal with sickness and old age that plague American society. — Kathleen Norris

One of the advantages of laws is that you can follow them blind, when you have lost all your moorings. You can't follow your instincts, but you can remember your rule. — Kathleen Norris

The imagination works not so much through inspiration as through perseverance. One must slog through the false starts, spot the wrong words and hold out for the right ones, and above all, be vigilant about staying on the path of revision, no matter how uncomfortable or even painful the journey might become. — Kathleen Norris

This is another day, O Lord ...
If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.
If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly.
If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently.
And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly. — Kathleen Norris

But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that the religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, and these days it is easy to lose sight of that as, like our society itself, churches are becoming more politicized and polarized. Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs. — Kathleen Norris

When you come to a place where you have to left or right,' says Sister Ruth, 'go straight ahead. — Kathleen Norris

I had begun to comprehend that the Bible's story is about the relationship of God to human beings, and of human beings to one another, and that this meant that it is our friendships, marriages, families, and even church congregations that best reveal what kind of theology we have, who our God is. Or, as Thomas Merton once put it, "because we love, God is present." That is the story. — Kathleen Norris

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

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

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary. — Kathleen Norris

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise
to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things
in order to make it come out right. — Kathleen Norris

If monks are crazy to live the way they do, maybe the world needs more such craziness, what Matthew Kelty has termed 'the madness of great love.' My narrow world had just opened wide, and I had glimpsed such a love. — Kathleen Norris

An old farmer once asked my husband and me how long we'd been in the country. "Five years," we answered. "Well, then," he said, "you've seen rain. — Kathleen Norris

Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other. — Kathleen Norris

Being closed in makes us edgy because it reminds us of our vulnerability before the elements; we can't escape the fact that life is precarious. — Kathleen Norris

Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found. — Kathleen Norris

Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it. — Kathleen Norris

Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, "But what is there to see?" The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light. — Kathleen Norris

Human inheritance is both blessing and curse. And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute. For many of us religion is heavy baggage. Stories of love and fear, liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences, and our family's past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition. What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up? What can we hold to, as blessing? — Kathleen Norris

If we are lucky, we can give in and rest without feeling guilty. We can stop doing and concentrate on being. — Kathleen Norris

A prophet's task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone. — Kathleen Norris

... religious traditions build up meaning only over time and in a communal context. They can't be purchased like a burger or a pair of shoes. — Kathleen Norris

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

None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives. — Kathleen Norris

True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'. — Kathleen Norris

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. — Kathleen Norris

Because we are made in God's image, in fleeing from a relationship with a loving God, we are also running from being our most authentic selves. — Kathleen Norris

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

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. — Kathleen Norris

There are men I could spend eternity with. But not this life. — Kathleen Norris

The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them. — Kathleen Norris

Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. 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

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

I just don't understand how you can get so much comfort from a religion whose language does so much harm." ... I realized that what troubled me most was her use of the word "comfort," so in my reply I addressed that first. I said that I didn't think it was comfort I was seeking, or comfort that I'd found. Look, I said to her, as a rush of words came to me. As far as I'm concerned, this religion has saved my life, my husband's life, and our marriage. So it's not comfort that I'm talking about but salvation. — Kathleen Norris

I recall the passage in the letter to the Hebrews in which we are reminded that Christ has already done everything for us. It speaks of the Christ who "offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins" (Hebrews 10:12). And yet the church teaches, and our experience of faith confirms, that Christ continues to be with us and to pray for us. The paradox may be unraveled, I think, if we remember that when human beings try to "do everything at once and for all and be through with it," we court acedia, self-destruction and death. Such power is reserved for God, who alone can turn what is "already done" into something that is ongoing and ever present. It is a quotidian mystery. — Kathleen Norris

Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves. — Kathleen Norris

The tragedy of sin is that it diverts gifts. The person who has a genuine capacity for loving becomes promiscuous, maybe sexually, or maybe by becoming frivolous and fickle, afraid to make a commitment to anyone or anything. The person with a gift for passionate intensity squanders it in angry tirades and, given power, becomes a demagogue. — Kathleen Norris

In choosing a bare bones existence, we are enriched, and can redefine success as an internal process rather than an outward display of wealth and power. — Kathleen Norris

Throb
You cut me
into pieces and
put them in separate corners
of the room
each part
placed under pillows
or into water
I grow from this darkness
like starfish
my fingers know the shape to take again — Kathleen Norris

When it comes to the nitty-gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God's love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it as a reality that humbles us even as it gives cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that marks each day rich with the possibility of salvation. — Kathleen Norris

From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been. — Kathleen Norris

Excerpts from the Angel Handbook
Be careful how you unfold your wings
there are some in the world who are not content
unless their teeth are full of feathers
...
You will meet some whose faces give a glw
as if they once had halos:
these are the lovers,
you will make a lot of love
and your flights, even though you are careful
to keep them invisible, will make those who love you sad:
they will not understand that you never go anyplace
you're not meant to be. — Kathleen Norris

There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year. — Kathleen Norris

At its Greek root, "to believe" simply means "to give one's heart to." Thus, if we can determine what it is we give our heart to, then we will know what it is we believe. — Kathleen Norris

Well, they tell us meat isn't good for us anyway! — Kathleen Norris

Monastic people have long known--and I've experienced it in a small way myself--that the communal reciting, chanting, and singing of the psalms brings a unique sense of wholeness and order to their day, and even establishes the rhythm of their lives. — Kathleen Norris

The Bible is full of evidence that God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us
loves us so much that we the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is "renewed in the morning" or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, "our inner nature is being renewed everyday". Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous details in Leviticus involving God in the minuitae of daily life might be revisioned as the very love of God. — Kathleen Norris

Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others. — Kathleen Norris

I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy? — Kathleen Norris

Listening to Jeremiah is one hell of a way to get your blood going in the morning; it puts caffeine to shame. — Kathleen Norris

It may be fashionable to assert that all is holy, but not many are willing to haul ass to church four or five times a day to sing about it. It's not for the faint of heart. — Kathleen Norris

Anger, [Evagrius] wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control. — Kathleen Norris

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

Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,
service is the secret. — Kathleen Norris

Might we consider boredom as not only necessary for our life but also as one of its greatest blessings? A gift, pure and simple, a precious chance to be alone with our thoughts and alone with God? — Kathleen Norris

What we perceive as dejection over the futility of life is sometimes greed, which the monastic tradition perceives as rooted in a fear of being vulnerable in a future old age, so that one hoards possessions in the present. But most often our depression is unexpressed anger, and it manifests itself as the sloth of disobedience, a refusal to keep up the daily practices that would keep us in good relationship to God and to each other. For when people allow anger to build up inside, they begin to perform daily tasks resentfully, focusing on the others as the source of their troubles. Instead of looking inward to find the true reason for their sadness - with me , it is usually a fear of losing an illusory control - they direct it outward, barreling through the world, impatient and even brutal with those they encounter, especially those who are closest to them. — Kathleen Norris

To church congregations and denominations that are weary of strife, of continually arguing things out in a tense, judgmental atmosphere, it may come as welcome news to learn that they, too, are allowed to say 'I know not' with regard to the Bible, free to not use it to justify taking sides in every issue that comes along. — Kathleen Norris

Blaming others wouldn't do. Only when I began to see the world's ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior. — Kathleen Norris

Pay close attention to objects, events and natural phenomenon that would otherwise get chewed up in the daily grind. — Kathleen Norris

I could suddenly grasp that not ever having to think about what to wear was freedom, that a drastic stripping down to essentials in one's dress might also be a drastic enrichment of one's ability to focus on more important things. — Kathleen Norris

The often heard lament, 'I have so little time,' gives the lie to the
delusion that the daily is of little significance. — Kathleen Norris