Quotes by 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. Its a price theyre not willing to pay.

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.

Change is still resented on the Plains, so much so much so that many small-town people cling to the dangerous notion that while the world outside may change drastically, their town does not...... when myth dictates that the town has not really changed, ways of adapting to new social and economic conditions are rejected: not vigorously, but with a strangely resolute inertia...Combatting inertia in a town such as Lemmon can seem like raising the dead. It is painful to watch intelligent business people who are dedicated to the welfare of the town spend most of their energy combatting those more set in their ways. Community spirit can still work wonders here - people raised over $500,000 in the hard times of the late 1980s to keep the Lemmon nursing home open...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...More than ever, Ive come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.

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...

More than ever, Ive come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.

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.

It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and wont allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.

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.

All that is necessary is to accept the impossible do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable.

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

None of us knows what the next change is going to be what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner waiting to change all the tenor of our lives.

One may have been a fool but theres no foolishness like being bitter.

Hate is all a lie there is no truth in hate.

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

Before you begin a thing remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. ... 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.

If ambition doesnt hurt you you havent got it.

Marriage: a job. Happiness or unhappiness has nothing to do with it.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Before you begin a thing remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. ... 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.