Quotes from Kathleen Norris

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

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.

This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.

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.

We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.

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

Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.

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.

Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.

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.

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

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.