Top 70 Kathleen Norris Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Kathleen Norris

2. “Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine.”

— Kathleen Norris

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

— Kathleen Norris

4. “Peace – that was the other name for home.”

— Kathleen Norris

5. “In spite of the cost of living, it’s still popular.”

— Kathleen Norris

6. “Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness, – service is the secret.”

— Kathleen Norris

7. “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

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

— Kathleen Norris

9. “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

10. “There are men I could spend eternity with. But not this life.”

— Kathleen Norris

11. “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

12. “Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value. The world doesn’t care if I write another word, and if I am to care, I have to summon all my interior motivation and strength.”

— Kathleen Norris

13. “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

14. “I write what I would like to read.”

— Kathleen Norris

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

— Kathleen Norris

16. “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

17. “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

18. “The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.”

— Kathleen Norris

19. “One may have been a fool, but there’s no foolishness like being bitter.”

— Kathleen Norris

20. “Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours.”

— Kathleen Norris

21. “Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn’t to be found.”

— Kathleen Norris

22. “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

23. “For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed and take us places where we didn’t know we didn’t want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.”

— Kathleen Norris

24. “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

25. “There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.”

— Kathleen Norris

26. “We can’t give our children the future, strive though we may to make it secure. But we can give them the present.”

— Kathleen Norris

27. “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

28. “In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made.”

— Kathleen Norris

29. “Pay close attention to objects, events and natural phenomenon that would otherwise get chewed up in the daily grind.”

— Kathleen Norris

30. “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

31. “If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it’s because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”

— Kathleen Norris

32. “They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.”

— Kathleen Norris

33. “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

34. “Conversion is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people – even the difficult, unbearable ones – are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?”

— Kathleen Norris

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom.”

— Kathleen Norris

40. “Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.”

— Kathleen Norris

41. “Changing husbands is only changing troubles.”

— Kathleen Norris

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “The lover of books is a miner, searching for gold.”

— Kathleen Norris

46. “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

47. “I was taught that I had to ‘master’ subjects. But who can ‘master’ beauty, or peace, or joy?”

— Kathleen Norris

48. “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

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

— Kathleen Norris

50. “Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas.”

— Kathleen Norris