Kathleen Norris
Kathleen Norris
Kathleen Thompson Norriswas 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,...
ruth left
When you come to a place where you have to left or right,' says Sister Ruth, 'go straight ahead.
baking bread ordinary
The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.
joy taught masters
I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
memorable unhappy should
When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?
life soul saving
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.
moving suffering surrender
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.
daily-tasks needs world
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.
christian ideas desire
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.
beautiful spring book
It's all so beautiful . . . the spring . . . and books and music and fires. . . . Why aren't they enough?
helping dictionary
This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.
winter years needs
There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.
friendship art natural-gifts
Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
humility exercise self
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.
giving feelings lucky
If we are lucky, we can give in and rest without feeling guilty. We can stop doing and concentrate on being.