Top 100 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes
#1. Missus said I was the worst waiting maid in Charleston. She said, "You are abysmal, Hetty, abysmal." I asked Miss Sarah what abysmal means and she said, "Not quite up to standard." Uh huh. I could tell from missus' face, there's bad, there's worse, and after that comes abysmal.
Sue Monk Kidd
#2. If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.
Sue Monk Kidd
#3. I didn't see why loving someone had to have so much agony attached to it. It felt like a series of fresh cuts in the skin of my heart
Sue Monk Kidd
#4. If you don't know where your're going, you should know where you came from.
Sue Monk Kidd
#5. The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.
Sue Monk Kidd
#6. Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.
Sue Monk Kidd
#7. One day i will have to forgive life for ending. I tell myself I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality ... just be what ti is.
Sue Monk Kidd
#8. They say you can bear anything if you can tell a story about it.
Sue Monk Kidd
#9. Squeezing it in my palm, I prayed, Please, God, let this seed you planted in me bear fruit.
Sue Monk Kidd
#10. You are my everlasting home. Don't you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.
Sue Monk Kidd
#11. I first saw 'The Dinner Party' in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke.
Sue Monk Kidd
#12. Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.
Sue Monk Kidd
#13. I walked past the stable and carriage house. The path took me cross the whole map of the world I knew. I hadn't yet seen the spinning globe in the house that showed the rest of it. p7
Sue Monk Kidd
#15. 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
#16. The time to assert one's right is when it's denied!
Sue Monk Kidd
#17. When he spoke, the roughness was gone from his voice. I could tell you I did it. That's what you wanna hear. I could tell you she did it to herself, but both ways I'd be lying. It was you who did it, Lily. You didn't mean it, but it was you.
Sue Monk Kidd
#18. One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their own authority.
Sue Monk Kidd
#19. I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.
Sue Monk Kidd
#20. time to assert one's right is when it's denied!" "I'm sorry,
Sue Monk Kidd
#21. You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards -Secret Life of the Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
#22. The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.
Sue Monk Kidd
#23. You're looking for a reason," she said. "And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.
Sue Monk Kidd
#24. Increasingly, during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign, torrential aches that overran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become someone.
Sue Monk Kidd
#25. I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.
Sue Monk Kidd
#26. If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.
Sue Monk Kidd
#27. Egg laying is the main thing, Lily. She's the mother of every bee in the hive, and they all depend on her to keep it going. I don't care what their job is
they know the queen is their mother. She's the mother of thousands.
Sue Monk Kidd
#28. Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind.
Sue Monk Kidd
#29. No," the mother told her. "It's too dangerous there".
A small incident, but when multiplied a hundred, a thousand times in a little girl's life, she learns that she's not as capable as a boy of handling life on the edge. She learns to hang back.
Sue Monk Kidd
#30. In the end, the only monument that matters may be the work of love we carve into the lives around us.
Sue Monk Kidd
#31. I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.
Sue Monk Kidd
#32. Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'
Sue Monk Kidd
#33. I live in a hive of darkness, and you are my mother, I told her. You are the mother of thousands.
Sue Monk Kidd
#34. Indeed, as I made my critique, the problem seemed to me not that there are differences but rather how we value these differences.
Sue Monk Kidd
#35. How does one know the voice is God's? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?
Sue Monk Kidd
#36. I prefer to read print books. Maybe I'm just a little old-school. I do read e-books.
Sue Monk Kidd
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.
Sue Monk Kidd
#40. In the early 1800s, religion was often used as a way to keep slavery in place. Slaves were forced to attend the church of their owners, listen to selective dogma that kept them obedient and subservient.
Sue Monk Kidd
#41. As writer Isak Dinesen put it, All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.
Sue Monk Kidd
#42. Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.
Sue Monk Kidd
#43. I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.
Sue Monk Kidd
#44. When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.
Sue Monk Kidd
#45. I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.
Sue Monk Kidd
#46. That's when I got true religion. I didn't know to call it religion back then, didn't know Amen from what-when, I just knew something came into me that made me feel the water belonged to me. I would say, that's my water out there.
Sue Monk Kidd
#47. I liked the way Walter Cronkite looked, with his black glasses and his voice that knew everything worth knowing. Here was a man who was not against books, that was plain. Take everything T. Ray was not, shape it into a person, and you would get Walter Cronkite.
Sue Monk Kidd
#48. I'd heard August say more than once, "If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you." T. Ray needed a face-saving way to hand me over, and August was giving it to him.
Sue Monk Kidd
#49. I sat at her desk and turned one page after another, staring at what looked like bits and pieces of black lace laid cross the paper.
Sue Monk Kidd
#50. Jonkonnu if you want to. That was a custom that got started
Sue Monk Kidd
#51. We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.
Sue Monk Kidd
#52. Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.
Sue Monk Kidd
#53. Actually, you can be bad at something ... but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright
Sue Monk Kidd
#54. That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love. ~Page 133.
Sue Monk Kidd
#55. I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place.
Sue Monk Kidd
#56. Words are the most beautiful things existed in the world, but they die as fast as they were born, unless you convert them to act!
The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
#57. There's no pain on earth that doesn't crave a benevolent witness.
Sue Monk Kidd
#58. A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost - don't see it, don't hear it, but it's always hovering round on ready.
Sue Monk Kidd
#59. 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
#60. There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.
Sue Monk Kidd
#61. Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn't help but envy the way a good storm got everyone's attention.
Sue Monk Kidd
#62. How one minute she was talking to you and the next she had slipped into a private world where she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most people would choke on. I wanted to say, Teach me how to do that. Teach me how to take all this in.
Sue Monk Kidd
#63. Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That's what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.
Sue Monk Kidd
#64. You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside
Sue Monk Kidd
#65. I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.
Sue Monk Kidd
#66. When compassion wakes up in us, we find ourselves more willing to become vulnerable, to take the risk of entering the pain of others.
Sue Monk Kidd
#67. I wondered what it was like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in the darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.
Sue Monk Kidd
#68. Such a notion made it virtually impossible to enjoy life! And this, If God did not exist, man would
Sue Monk Kidd
#69. Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.
Sue Monk Kidd
#71. For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging.
Sue Monk Kidd
#72. Back then, Miss Sarah pulled words up from her throat like she was raising water from a well.
Sue Monk Kidd
#74. The men expressed the shock of reading something geared exclusively to the feminine. It stunned them with an awareness of what women experience. They said they'd felt religiously excluded for the first time in their lives.
Sue Monk Kidd
#75. She didn't even know how dangerous the truth could be, all the tiny, shattering seeds it carried.
Sue Monk Kidd
#76. He will use the word "love", and the world will not stop spinning but go right on in its courses, like the river, like the bees, like everything.
Sue Monk Kidd
#77. I was afraid, though, the blame would find a way to stick to them. That's how blame was.
Sue Monk Kidd
#78. Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it.
Sue Monk Kidd
#79. It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.
Sue Monk Kidd
#80. I feel again the hunger to let go of my striving and find the ability to become content and still, intentionally "superfluous," as writer Helen M. Luke puts it. I want a refuge from my old conquering self.
Sue Monk Kidd
#81. I was a very good nurse, but I burned out after eight years or so because it wasn't what I truly wanted to do. Writing is what I belong to.
Sue Monk Kidd
#82. . . Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us . . . if they only come to nothing?
Sue Monk Kidd
#83. Sometimes I was so busy being tuned in to outside ideas, expectations, and demands, I failed to hear the unique music in my soul. I forfeited my ability to listen creatively to my deepest self, to my own God within.
Sue Monk Kidd
#84. I grew up in Georgia, in a small town in the southwest corner of Georgia, actually, called Sylvester.
Sue Monk Kidd
#86. The whole problem with people is they don't know what matters and what doesn't.
Sue Monk Kidd
#88. There are so many different things out there trying to hook our attention, we writers have to be very selective and make certain that it is coming from inside out, not outside in.
Sue Monk Kidd
#89. The problem is [people] know what matters, but they don't choose it.
Sue Monk Kidd
#90. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is. The
Sue Monk Kidd
#91. He gazed at me with kindness and pity. "To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil." I turned
Sue Monk Kidd
#92. After you get stung, you can't get unstung
no matter how much you whine about it.
Sue Monk Kidd
#93. I could no more pretend I didn't have a mother than the sea could pretend it had no salt. My mother existed for me with a vengeance. Sometimes her voice would come piping through my bones and practically lift me off my feet.
Sue Monk Kidd
#94. My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.
Sue Monk Kidd
#95. Don't be telling me
can't be done. That's some god damney white talk, that's what that is.
Sue Monk Kidd
#96. I didn't know how to be in the world without her.
Sue Monk Kidd
#97. You have untold strengths and resources inside. You have your glorious self.
Sue Monk Kidd
#98. As de Beauvoir put it, religion had given men a God like themselves
a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority has been vested in them by the Supreme Being.
Sue Monk Kidd
#99. A woman, nothing existed but the domestic sphere and those tiny flowers etched on the pages of my art book. For a woman to aspire to be a lawyer - well, possibly, the world would end. But an acorn grew into an oak tree, didn't it?
Sue Monk Kidd
#100. All that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.
Sue Monk Kidd
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