Quotes by Kathleen Norris

About Kathleen Norris:

Kathleen Thompson Norris was a popular American novelist and newspaper columnist. She was one of the most widely read and highest paid female writers in the United States for nearly fifty years, from 1911 to 1959. Her stories appeared in the Atlantic, The American Magazine, McClure's, Everybody's, Ladies' Home Journal and Woman's Home Companion, and she wrote 93 novels, many of which were best sellers. She used her fiction to promote values including the sanctity of marriage, the nobility of motherhood, and the importance of service to others.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 t...

Kathleen Norris

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

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 liv...

Kathleen Norris

It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won't allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.

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 ...

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

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

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’...

Kathleen Norris

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

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

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

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

Like faith, marriage is a mystery. The person you’re committed to spending your life with is known and yet unknown, at the same time remarkably intimate and necessarily other. The classic seven-year itch may not be a case of familiarity breeding en...

Kathleen Norris

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

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

...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 matte...

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

The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances.

Kathleen Norris

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameKathleen Norris
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornJuly 16, 1880
  • DiedJanuary 18, 1966
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Novelist