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

— 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

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

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.

— Kathleen Norris

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...

— Kathleen Norris

Change is still resented on the Plains, 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 Lemon 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 Lemon 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, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.

— Kathleen Norris

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

— 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 as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.

— Kathleen Norris

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

— Kathleen Norris

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

— Kathleen Norris