Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

My mother's life was way too heavy for me.

You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and al...

You've been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that when it's time to die, go ahe...

He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God ...

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely dif...

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it ...

Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?

There is nothing perfect...only life.

Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.

Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice comin...

Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you l...

Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your...

Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boat...

It occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what's divine can come in dark skin.

The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to yo...

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with ...

I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now. It's my tim...

I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had ente...

Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now

It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.

Look at her good, Lily," she said, "'cause you're seeing the end of something.""I am?""Yes, you are,...

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but af...

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I d...

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're he...

I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee ...

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I wa...

As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched in ...

August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a pers...

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.

The whole problem with people is they know what matters but they don't choose it. ~Secret Lives of B...

Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of the...

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but af...

...Mary, fresh with feminist appropriations, has the potential to undergird women’s reformations.

The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter wit...

I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light,...

When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and pryin...

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to ...

I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but ...

Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women m...

I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of we...

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides...

And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just ...

My mother was a good Catholic -- she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my fat...

I can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me.

In the photograph by my bed my other is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, ...

...he felt God the same way arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only a hint of...

There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreduc...

You're looking for a reason," she said. "And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.

I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.

There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meter out in these precious sips. I would well ...

Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no...

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever...

I can't explain that, except to say there's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it...

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that y...

Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humm...

I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

I said, "Where's all that delivering God's supposed to do?"He snorted. "You're right, the only deliv...

How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose mys...

To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!

Don't be telling me--can't be done. That's some god damney white talk, that's what that is.

I said out loud, "Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you an...

Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you,...

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you...

There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years o...

By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem p...

The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the...

Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, ...

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and sh...

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ...

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too...

You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.To forgive does not mean overlooking t...

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women ...

This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was withi...

Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two...

Not setting the 'proper and accepted' religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mothe...

we need not avoid our active lives, but simply bring to them a new vision and shift of gravity. for ...

The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth...

Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that...

How do we accomplish this matter of gathering life together in God? We must begin primarily by refoc...

The basic dynamics of conversion are summed up for me in the words LEAVE-ARRIVE, END-BEGIN, SHED-EME...

I believe in the goodness of imagination.

I have knots in my years that I can`t undo, and this is one of the worst--the night I did wrong and ...

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in wr...

...The world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, ...

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me;...

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first...

And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart that's Mary too not only the power inside you b...

I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.

Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster ...

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, t...

I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I ...

I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to.

I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but ...

There's a gap somehow between empathy and activism. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of 'soul ...

One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in th...