Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “My aunt’s mouth was a wellspring of thrilling and unpredictable utterances.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

452. “Not frail or insubstantial, but distilled, concentrated.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

453. “Instead she told me that I had traveled to a secret sky, the one beyond this one where the queen of heaven reigns, for Yahweh knew nothing of female matters of the heart.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

454. “I will not forget what Jesus said to me when I finished my song. He said, ‘Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

455. “I, Haran ben Philip Levias, faithful patron of the Therapeutae for two decades, write to Skepsis, the community’s esteemed leader, and ask that my sister and niece, who are presently under the Therapeutae’s guardianship, be relinquished into my care, where they will be accorded every concern and favor. By delivering them to the men who encamp nearby, the Therapeutae will continue to enjoy my loyal generosity.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

456. “I’m left with nothing but this strange beating in my heart that tells me I’m meant to do something in this world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

457. “We had a citywide emergency on our hands, as there is no greater affliction for the southern mind than people up north coming down to fix our way of life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

458. “Jesus’s capacity for mercy baffled me. I didn’t know if I could give up the wrongs my father had done, the way I hauled them around like an ossuary of precious old bones. Jesus made it seem as if one could just lay them down.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

459. “The Matriarchs The Tales of Terror Phasaelis and Herod Antipas My Life in Nazareth Lamentations for Susanna Jesus, Beloved Yaltha.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

460. “The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

461. “She smiled and the skin wrinkled around her eyes in that way that makes a woman beautiful.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

462. “He turned on his side to face me and I felt that he saw deep inside me. He said, “I bless the largeness in you, Ana.” “And I bless yours,” I told him. Then he rose and, opening the door, stared toward the valley with the same deep, pure gaze he’d cast on me. I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right. Parting was fully upon us now.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

463. “I ain’t sorry for stealing it, just for getting caught.” “How come you took it?” “Cause,” she said. “Cause I could.” Those words stuck with me. Mauma didn’t want that cloth, she just wanted to make some trouble. She couldn’t get free and she couldn’t pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

464. “Naturally, arranging a marriage between two families separated by a chasm like this would’ve been impossible unless the bride possessed extraordinary beauty or the groom bore some bodily defect.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

465. “Our religion might preach love, but it was based on purity. God was holy and pure; therefore we must be holy and pure. But here was a poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore we must be love.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

466. “And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart, that’s Mary, too, not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it, Lily, that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love – but to persist in love.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

467. “Ana, I don’t doubt you should give yourself to motherhood. I only question what it is you’re meant to mother.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “If God said in plain language, “I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,” a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

474. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

476. “As I painted, deeply buried emotions boiled to the surface.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

478. “That’s how it turned out in the end, but in the first months after my return from California, we experienced doubt and tension. I woke every day to uncertainty about my marriage.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

479. “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

480. “Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

481. “Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

482. “Life had taken a mallet to me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

483. “What a shitbucket.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

484. “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

485. “I realized that the heart of religion was setting up an honest dialogue with the uniqueness of one’s soul and finding a deeply personal relationship with God, the inner Voice, the inner Music that plays in you as it does in no one else.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

486. “It was something of a wonder to discover that the human Jesus has so many different faces and that people, even historical Jesus scholars, tend to view him through the lens of their own needs and proclivities. For some he’s a political activist. For others, a miracle worker. He’s viewed as rabbi, social prophet, religious reformer, wisdom teacher, nonviolent revolutionary, philosopher, feminist, apocalyptic preacher, and on and on.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

487. “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

488. “We ate till we were tired out from eating, which is the way people in South Carolina eat at family reunions.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

489. “No one had avenged the unnamed concubine. Jacob did not seek vengeance on Shechem. King David did not punish his son.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

490. “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

491. “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

492. “The sun’s pink fingers were still wrapped around the clouds.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

493. “I wanted it to suggest how important it is to take the broken, painful, and discarded fragments of our lives and piece them into something whole. There can be healing, and power, too, in giving expression to what’s inside of us, in having our voices heard and our pain witnessed. 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

494. “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.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

495. “Uhhh yea, just did. 30 years ago. You.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

499. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd