Kathleen Norris

4/5

Biography

Kathleen Norris was born on July 27, 1947 in Washington, D.C. She grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, as well as on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Lemmon, South Dakota. Her sheltered upbringing left her unprepared for the world she encountered when she began attending Bennington College in Vermont. At first shocked by the unconventionality surrounding her, Norris took refuge in poetry. After she graduated in 1969, she moved to New York City where she joined the arts scene, associated with members of the avant-garde movement including Andy Warhol, and worked for the American Academy of Poets. In 1974, her grandmother died leaving Norris the family farm in South Dakota, and she and her future husband, the poet David Dwyer, decided to temporarily relocate there until arrangements to rent or sell the property could be made. Instead, they ended up remaining in South Dakota for the next 25 years.Soon after moving to the rural prairie, Norris developed a relationship with the nearby Benedictine abbey, which led to her eventually becoming an oblate. In 2000, Norris and her husband traded their farmhouse on the Great Plains for a condo in Honolulu, Hawaii, so that Norris could help care for her aging parents after her husband’s own failing health no longer permitted him to travel. Her father died in 2002, and her husband died the following year in 2003.

  • Primary profession
  • Writer
  • Country
  • United States
  • Nationality
  • American
  • Gender
  • Female
  • Birth date
  • 16 July 1880
  • Place of birth
  • San Francisco
  • Death date
  • 1966-01-18
  • Death age
  • 86
  • Place of death
  • San Francisco
  • Children
  • Andrew Romanoff·
  • Spouses
  • Charles Gilman Norris
  • Education
  • University of California· Berkeley
  • Knows language
  • English language
  • Parents

Books

Trivia

Interred at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, Palo Alto, California.

Quotes

[on reading] Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting at the end,of a long day makes that day happier.

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.

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

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.

. . . 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 matter how uncomfortable or even painful the journey might become.

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

What we perceive as dejection over the futility of life is sometimes greed, which the monastic tradition perceives as rooted in a fear of being vulnerable in a future old age, so that one hoards possessions in the present. But most often our depression is unexpressed anger, and it manifests itself as the sloth of disobedience, a refusal to keep up the daily practices that would keep us in good relationship to God and to each other. For when people allow anger to build up inside, they begin to perform daily tasks resentfully, focusing on the others as the source of their troubles. Instead of looking inward to find the true reason for their sadness - with me , it is usually a fear of losing an illusory control - they direct it outward, barreling through the world, impatient and even brutal with those they encounter, especially those who are closest to them.

I recall the passage in the letter to the Hebrews in which we are reminded that Christ has already done everything for us. It speaks of the Christ who "offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins" (Hebrews 10:12). And yet the church teaches, and our experience of faith confirms, that Christ continues to be with us and to pray for us. The paradox may be unraveled, I think, if we remember that when human beings try to "do everything at once and for all and be through with it," we court acedia, self-destruction and death. Such power is reserved for God, who alone can turn what is "already done" into something that is ongoing and ever present. It is a quotidian mystery.

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.

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. . .

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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. .

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