Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Leaning back on my elbows, I slid down till the water sealed over my head. I held my breath and listened to the scratch of river against my ears, sinking as far as I could into that shimmering, dark world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

452. “That there was also largeness in you. I knew you possessed a generosity of abilities that comes only rarely into the world. You knew it, too, for you wrote of it in your bowl. But we all have some largeness in us, don’t we, Ana?” “What are you saying, Aunt?” “What most sets you apart is the spirit in you that rebels and persists. It isn’t the largeness in you that matters most, it’s your passion to bring it forth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

453. “I’m racked with longings. I’m selfish and willful and sometimes deceitful. I rebel. I’m easy to anger. I doubt the ways of God. I’m an outsider everywhere I go.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

454. “Her words infuriated me. I wondered for a moment if holding my tongue would help my cause with Mother. Was it ever right to sacrifice one’s truth for expedience? Mother would do what she would do, wouldn’t she? I wondered how it was possible I’d found my words out there in the world, but could lose them in the house where I was born.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

455. “Then, on the roof, as close to the sky as I could get, I danced. My body was a reed pen. It spoke the words I couldn’t write: I dance not for men to choose me. Not for God. I dance for Sophia. I dance for myself.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

456. “After my first winter in the North, I had an entirely new appreciation for heat.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

457. “Martha Whites were a form of punishment only T. Ray could have dreamed up. I shut my mouth instantly.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

458. “Glancing behind me, I saw that the few who’d remained to walk with him were women. Where were these disciples of his? The fishermen? The men? Were women the only ones with hearts large enough to hold such anguish?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

459. “Life had taken a mallet to me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

460. “What a shitbucket.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

461. “This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

462. “I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There’s a place in you that is inviolate. You’ll find your way there, when you need to. And you’ll know then what I speak of.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

463. “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. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved to in assimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

464. “I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I’d once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

465. “But yours is the God of the Jews,” Diodora said. “I know nothing of him. It’s Isis I serve.” “We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we’ll find the God that exists behind them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

466. “In Christian language, this is plain, old-fashioned surrender – giving up our conscious will and striving, and yielding instead to the inner kingdom. The soul-work involved in this internal restructuring is, I believe, the deepest meaning of spiritual becoming.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

467. “In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

468. “It’s not meant to be a factual story, but it’s still true.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

469. “Meekness. It isn’t meekness I need, it’s anger.” I’d not forgotten this. I knelt beside my friend.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

470. “But you can’t talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you’re not.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

471. “I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

472. “May this severing not cut us apart, but bind us together.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

473. “Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself. There in the rootbed of fertility, World without end, as the legend tells it. Under the words you are my silence.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

474. “The day we gathered our daughter’s bones, the valley was full of wild lilies. Do you remember? You told me to consider the lilies, that God takes care of them and will surely, then, care for us. Consider them now, my love. Consider the lilies.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

475. “There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control. Yes, it’s unfair to deprive them, but there’s a greater good here that must be protected.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

476. “The life you’re living can be torn apart like Osiris’s and a new one pieced together. Some of you might die and a new self will rise up to take it’s place.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

477. “We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mama had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing down your neck.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

478. “The skies were bright cerulean, teeming with ferocious winds, spilling mallards and fat wood drakes from the clouds.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

479. “But he was Jesus, and I was Ana. I wasn’t ready to let go of my animosity toward Judas. I would do so in time, but right now it saved me. It left less room inside for pain.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

480. “There was so much in the world to be had and not had.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

481. “He sensed my fear, and wishing to break its spell, he said, “Consider the lilies of the field. They are not anxious, yet God takes care of them. How much more will he take care of you?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

482. “In the hidden forest in my chest, the trees slowly lost their leaves.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

483. “The words opened a raw, furious place in me. She wanted me to write? My daughter was dead. My writing was dead, too. One day had never come. I was the shattered pieces on the floor. Life had taken a mallet to me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

484. “When she talks about her feelings, I have to consciously tell myself she wants me to receive them, not fix them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

485. “There is nothing perfect, there is only life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

486. “She’s the mother of thousands.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

487. “Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what objets d’art we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

488. “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

489. “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

490. “She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow’s cap with strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak and tiny fur-lined shoes. She was known to line girls up on the Idle Bench for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised her, and her “polite education for the female mind,” which was composed.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

491. “Remembering Enheduanna, who signed her name to her writing, I reopened the books and signed mine: Ana. Not Ana, daughter of Matthias, or Ana, wife of Jesus. Just Ana.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

492. “Ann, seeking her true self, her autonomy and voice, her place in the world; and me, looking for the sap of spring, the ability to conjure a new dream of myself and bring it forth. Ann.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

493. “When we adopt this particular ego mask, we invest ourselves in the notion that those who shine the brightest are loved the most. This comes from the distorted idea that meaning and acceptance come from what we do, not who we are. We buy into the widespread notion that “light” emanates from our achievements, not from the divine fire within our soul.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

494. “Anger is effortless, Lucian. Kindness is hard.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

495. “The anger made me brave and the grief made me sure.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

496. “He learned well, and his suffering didn’t harden him. It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

497. “Only women hearing each other can create a counterworld to the prevailing reality.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

498. “If I’d been a thorn in Mother’s side, Angelina would be the whole briar patch.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

499. “My father says my mind is weak, and my tongue, weaker, she’d told me then. It seemed now her tongue was not weak, but the fiercest part of her.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

500. “I took a deep breath and gazed up at him. “Jesus.” His head slumped toward his shoulder and I saw he was looking at me. He didn’t speak, nor did I, but I told myself later that everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering.”

— Sue Monk Kidd