Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now. It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula. p94

~ Sue Monk Kidd

When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and prying? I have an uneasy feeling I will have to carry the question around for a while like some grating pebble in my shoe.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in the world...How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling and domestic artistry?...I wanted to go out and do things--write books, speak out. I've been driven by that. I don't know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to BE at home--and really, to be in herself. It's actually very beautiful what she does...I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn’t mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched in puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my piss and June's. That's what i thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss is Piss.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Not setting the 'proper and accepted' religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example?

~ Sue Monk Kidd

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, “I'm sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel.” It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one's liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. “So we just the same, me and you? That's why you the one to shit in the pot and I'm the one to empty it?

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet.The time to assert one's right is when it's denied!

~ Sue Monk Kidd

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said, You are unlovable...

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth where the will is stirred And that is a deeper place by far. That is the place of response, of unifying one's heart, mind, soul and feet around a decision.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

The basic dynamics of conversion are summed up for me in the words LEAVE-ARRIVE, END-BEGIN, SHED-EMERGE. These are the tensions of conversion and spiritual awakening.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Sue Monk Kidd