Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

454. “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

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. “We can’t change anything until we acknowledge the problem.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

458. “For what it’s worth, charting one’s passion in a small daybook kept hidden in a hatbox inside a wardrobe does not subdue passion in the least.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

475. “Let life be life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

480. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

482. “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

483. “But frankly, it may not be possible to completely avoid the clash of feelings that accompanies powerful transitions. Sometimes the exchange may be calm and fruitful, but often it’s a wild taxi ride.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

484. “Most everyone has a private torment, some voracious badger that gnaws at them without ceasing, and this was Father’s.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

486. “You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

487. “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

488. “Nina and I laughed, and then astonishingly, Mother laughed, and the sound the three of us made together in the room created a silly joy inside me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

489. “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

490. “You have never heard such music, how it made us believe death was nothing but a doorway.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

491. “How, though, could anyone be born while quarantined in this house?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

492. “I will think only of him. I will give him more than my presence; I will give him the full attention of my heart.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

493. “We must let life be life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

494. “We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

495. “The vision was a promise, was it not, that the light in me would not be extinguished. The largeness in me would not shrink away. I would yet become visible in this world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

496. “If God were a wife, she would have acted sooner.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

497. “It occurs to me that perhaps the memories most likely to resonate do not fall happenstance into our lives. They are created.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

498. “And despite all that Jesus had just said, all his prevarication and provisos, the most curious feeling came over me, that I was always meant to arrive at this moment.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

499. “I felt like I was dissolving. A dandelion going to seed.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

500. “Years ago, your father and I adopted this piece of chain as a symbol for our marriage. The two outer links represent each of our lives and the center link, our marriage. It reminds us that we have independent lives, dreams, and journeys, but at the same time, we are joined in a center space where our lives are one. We.”

— Sue Monk Kidd