Best 241 quotes of Sue Monk Kidd on MyQuotes

We become what we pay attention to.

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.

we need not avoid our active lives, but simply bring to them a new vision and shift of gravity. for in the center we are rooted in god's love. in such a place there is no need for striving and impatience and dashing about seeking approval.

Were all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all.

We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

Whatever else you do, listen to your Deepest Self. Love Her and be true to Her, speak Her truth, always.

What has happened to our ability to dwell in the unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting.

What matters is giving over to what you love.

What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self.

When compassion wakes up in us, we find ourselves more willing to become vulnerable, to take the risk of entering the pain of others.

When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small?

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.

When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly.

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.

When you can't go forward, and you can't go backward, and you can't stay where you are without killing off something deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation.

Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.

Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and remind you who you could be with a little work.

"Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don't want to play football," he said. "I wanna be a lawyer." "That's fine with me," I said, a little annoyed. "I've just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that's all. You've got to hear of these things before you can imagine them." "Bullshit. You gotta imagine what's never been.

Women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders. Women need to attack culture's oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to "buy in" or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate.

Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.

You are my everlasting home. Don't you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.

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

You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.

You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.

You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.

You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.

You gotta imagine what's never been.

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

You have untold strengths and resources inside. You have your glorious self.

You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards" -Secret Life of the Bees

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.

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!

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)

As long as you live under my roof, you'll do what I say!" he shouted. Then I'll find another roof, I thought. "You understand me?" he said. "Yes sir, I understand" I said, and I did too. I understand that a new rooftop would do wonders for me.

Aunt-Sister would’ve said, ‘Let her go, it’s past the time,’ but I wanted the pain of mauma’s face and hands more than the peace of being without them.

A 'woman on the loose' is a woman who leaves the woods where she has been growing strong all these years. She swoops out of trees, ringing her bell. She is saying, I am here now. And I am not going away. The motto that the women on the loose adopted is: 'To improvise, surprise, and come uninvited.

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.

Did you know there are 32 names for love in one of the Eskimo language? And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have more ways to say it.

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

Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn’t know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who’d once filled it up. I didn’t stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.

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

I can't explain that, except to say there's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at least, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.

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

I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through t something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.

I don’t know how many evenings we’d spent in here talking, or like tonight, sitting quietly like two solitudes. Lucretia and I had formed a bond that went beyond friends. And yet I felt the difference between us. I noticed it at Meetings when I saw her on the Facing bench, the only female minister among all those men, the way she rose and spoke with such fearless beauty, and every morning when I went downstairs and there were her children sticky with oat gruel. I would get a faintly vacuous feeling in the pit of my stomach, not from envy that she had a profession, or these little ones, or even James, who was not like other men, but of some unknown species, a husband who beamed over her profession and made the oat gruel himself. No, it wasn’t that. It was the belonging I envied. She’d found her belonging.

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

I laid my palm on the second square – the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.

I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose. But sitting here now, I knew if I’d accepted Israel’s proposal, I would’ve regretted that, too. I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.