Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

455. “What a shitbucket.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

456. “I slept with grief and woke to it. It was always there, a black strap around my heart.”

— 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. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

460. “I rubbed my finger across my cheek and the tip of it came back with a smear of ink. It seemed ironic, sad, beautiful, almost purposeful that I am the wife had been smudged onto my skin.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

461. “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

462. “It almost bereaves me to think of unrealized potentials dying inside, the small miscarriages of self. I.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

463. “I was gazing at a sea of waiting faces, and it occurred to me that after my tall, dazzling sister, I must’ve been a sight. Perhaps I was even a shock. I was short, middle-aged, and plain, with a tiny pair of spectacles on the end of my nose, and I still wore my old Quaker clothes. I was comfortable in them now. I’m who I am. The thought made me smile, and everywhere I looked, the women smiled back, and I imagined they understood what I was thinking.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

464. “Well, that’s the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she aught to live inside it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

465. “In these last minutes, what did he most want to hear-that he’d been seen and heard in this world? That he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do? That he’d loved and been loved?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

466. “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth. I am a voice.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

467. “It was the twilit hour. Moroseness didn’t come easily to me – anger did, yes; passion and stubbornness, always – but sitting here, I felt bereft.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

468. “For nearly two years, I’d worn my grief for Jesus like a second skin. In all that time, the pain of his absence had not diminished. The familiar burning came to my eyes, followed by that sense I often got of wandering inside my heart, desperately searching for what I could never find – my husband. I feared my grief would turn to despair, that it would become a skin I couldn’t shed.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

469. “He waited actively – letting go, descending into the depths of his soul, listening, opening himself to change, praying.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

470. “I’ll put it in a story.” I don’t know if that’s what he wanted to ask me, but it’s something everybody wants – for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

471. “I’m sorry I thrust so much on you at once. I’m not known for subtlety. My delicate side wore away many years ago.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

472. “My aunt’s mouth was a wellspring of thrilling and unpredictable utterances.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

473. “I recall a story I love about Jung. One of his students came to him and asked: “Professor, could you please tell me the shortest distance to my life goal?” Without hesitation Jung replied, “The detour.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

474. “It reassured me suddenly to think of God not as a person like ourselves, but as an essence that lived everywhere. God could be love, as Jesus believed. For me, he would be I Am Who I Am, the beingness in our midst.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

475. “As I write, I sit in Lazarus’s courtyard where your friend Tabitha is playing the lyre, filling the air with the sweetest of music. Jesus has gone to the Mount of Olives to pray. He has missed you, Ana. He bids me give you his love. We await you. Your brother, Judas 10th day of Shebat.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

476. “No,” I said, too quickly. I had an outstanding talent for committing deceit, but none for hiding it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

478. “There was a feeling in me like rising water. It broke over me, finally, leaving behind the thing I knew, but didn’t know. Nazareth had never been my home. Jesus had been my home.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

479. “They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there, it seemed as if everything stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I’d ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

480. “I remember thinking: We’ve come to the split in the river. I felt, whether or not it was true, that my life would be decided now. It would rush one way or go the other.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

481. “There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meter out in these precious sips. I would well up from Hugh’s heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

482. “She bent and put her arms around me. “Sarah darling, you’ve fought harder than I imagined, but you must give yourself over to your duty and your fate and make whatever happiness you can.”O.”

— 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. “As I looked at their faces, love filled me up. It was the wise and difficult love that reminds parents that all we can really do is be true to our own spiritual unfolding and trust that our examples will one day help them be true to theirs. For children have a guiding spiritual wisdom inside of them, too.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

485. “Forming a critique is essential to the birth and development of a spiritual feminist consciousness. Until a woman is willing to set aside her unquestioned loyalty and look critically at the tradition and convention of her faith, her awakening will never fully emerge. The extent of her healing, autonomy, and power is related to the depth of the critique she is able to integrate into her life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

486. “So it would happen to me and so it will happen to all who set out to knead their pain and wounds, their hopes and hungers, into bread. Waiting is the yeasting of the human soul.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

487. “We’re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

488. “I’d observed five of Mother’s gestations, and clearly this was her most difficult. She’d enlarged to mammoth proportions. Even her poor face appeared bloated. Nevertheless, she’d created an elaborate fete.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

489. “Mary laughed. Then we all laughed. There was a vast relief in it, as if the air had grown more spacious. Was laughter grieving, too?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

490. “Is there an odyssey the female soul longs to make at the approach of fifty – one that has been blurred and lost within a culture awesomely alienated from soul? If so, what sort of journey would that be? Where would it take me?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

491. “The best gift she has given me is the constancy of her belief. Whatever I become, she loves me. To her, I am enough.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

492. “In the end, the only monument that matters may be the work of love we carve into the lives around us.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

493. “Let life be life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

494. “I could make do with that misery and take my solace from the water.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

495. “That night in my bed, when I closed my eyes, bee hum ran through my body. Ran through the whole earth. It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

496. “Do what you have to do, censure us, withdraw your support, we’ll press on anyway. Now, sirs, kindly take your feet off our necks.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

497. “How long, I thought, has it been since she was listened to, much less understood?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

498. “One night sitting beside the Greek shore, Shirley thinks to herself, “I’ve allowed myself to lead this little life when inside me there is so much more... That’s where Shirley Valentine disappeared to. She got lost in all this unused life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

499. “A wave of fear passed through me. Our lives and fates left to men. This world, this God-forsaken world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

500. “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